REVEALING THE EARLY RENAISSANCE: STORIES AND SECRETS IN FLORENTINE ART at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West), to June 16. $25, srs $21.50, stu $16.50, Wednesdays 6-8:30 pm $12.50. 416-979-6648. Rating: NNNNN
This exquisite show homes in on a pivotal time in European history: the early 1300s in the banking and trading city of Florence, at the end of the Middle Ages.
Curators Christine Sciacca of L.A.’s Getty Museum and the AGO’s Sasha Suda tell a story of social and cultural change, focusing on modestly sized religious panel paintings and illuminated manuscripts from European and North American collections.
Affluent Florentine patrons wanted to see people like themselves represented with a new realism. A historical image commissioned by a merchant for a book recording grain prices hints at the beginning of secular art, while religious pictures divided into comic-book-like storytelling segments testify to a thirst for learning. Illustrations for vernacular literature like Dante’s Divine Comedy required artists to come up with images that had no precedent.
Part of what makes the painting of this transitional period by masters like Giotto di Bondone and Bernardo Daddi so beautiful is the tension between spirit and materiality created by setting three-dimensional, individualized figures and primitive architecture into the medieval sacred space of gilded skies framed in Gothic arches.
The curators share the joys of discovery, reuniting works held in disparate collections (both multi-panel paintings and manuscripts were often broken up at later dates), including the Laudario Of Sant’Agnese, a hymnal commissioned by a merchants’ music group. They’ve also restored the Laudario’s painters, the lesser-known Pacino di Bonaguida and the Master of the Dominican Effigies, to deserved prominence, exhibiting more of their works on panel and parchment.
A wealth of historical info is available on iPads, and a display elucidates painters’ materials and techniques. But first-rank artworks like Giotto’s Peruzzi Altarpiece and Daddi’s Virgin Mary With Saints Thomas Aquinas And Paul stand on their own.
Forget current events at the Vatican and look at these paintings as expressions of spirituality in a time of newfound artistic freedom.
art@nowtoronto.com
