Holy allegory

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Holy Allegory (Giovanni Bellini)
Holy allegory
Giovanni Bellini , around 1490/1500
oil on wood
73 × 119 cm
Uffizi Gallery

Holy Allegory is a painting by Giovanni Bellini that was created in Venice around 1500. It hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence today . The unsigned, enigmatic image, for which no conclusive interpretation is available, has been used under different names throughout its history: Allegoria Sacra , Christian Allegory , Allegory of Purgatory or Madonna at the Lake .

history

The commissioner of the picture is not known, so far there are no relevant sources. In the 18th century it was in the art collection of the Habsburgs and then became part of the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In 1793, Luigi Lanzi , the head of the Uffizi Gallery at the time, arranged an exchange and acquired the picture, which at that time was ascribed to Giorgione . It was not until 1876 that Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe made the generally accepted attribution as a work of Bellini.

In 2010 the picture was subjected to a restoration in the Uffizi Gallery.

description

A diverse landscape stretches out behind a wide terrace on the banks of a lake. Steep cliffs rise up on the fjord-like lake, there is a city wall, houses and in the center of the picture in the background a castle on a wooded hill. White clouds move across the blue sky.

Scattered in the landscape are people and animals: two people dressed in Greek who greet each other, a donkey driver, a farmer with a stick, a shepherd sits thoughtfully in a cave, and a centaur looks at an old man who is laboriously climbing down a staircase. A large wooden cross is erected on one of the steep walls.

The terrace takes up over a third of the picture. It is surrounded by a balustrade and lavishly covered with white, black and colored marble, and a door to the lake opens in the middle. Trees that are still bare or already spring green grow here and there on the bank. A number of people populate the terrace, but none of them have eye contact with others. On the left , a woman clad in the canonical colors of the Virgin Mary sits enthroned on a five-step antique throne crowned by a red canopy . Red dress, blue coat, white headscarf, next to her a woman with folded hands and a crown on her head and another woman who has no feet and seems to be floating in the air. On the opposite side two almost naked men stand side by side: St. Sebastian with two parallel long arrows in his shoulder and kneecap, and St. Onophrius as an old man with a long white beard and a loincloth.

Behind the balustrade on the left stands the apostle Paul with his long sword drawn, next to him Peter , albeit without his usual iconographic accessories, and on the far left a man in oriental clothes with a white turban leaves the picture. In the middle of the terrace, an apple tree grows in a planter, and a naked boy is holding onto it. Around the bucket three other boys are playing with apples.

Art historical classification

Although the client and the location of the presentation of the picture are not known, it could belong to the so-called poetry , poetic, atmospheric pictures that are full of learned allusions. The clients sat at the northern Italian courts of the Renaissance - such as B. in Ferrara, Urbino, Mantua or Florence - and equipped their studioli with such pictures. These enigmatic pictures could very well be deciphered by members of the humanistically educated circles at the courts, even if they were remote sources and unusual allusions acts. An example of one of these remote sources is the figure of the Centaur in Bellini's picture: Maffeo Vegio reports in his book Antoniados sive de vita et laudibus sancti Antonii of an encounter between the saint and a Centaur. This motif was quite common in late medieval painting and the art of the early Renaissance. So the monk coming down the stairs could be Antony . For other figures, e.g. B. the floating woman, has not yet found a plausible explanation, although the function of these figures remains unexplained.

literature

  • Rona Goffen: Giovanni Bellini . Yale University Press, New Haven et al. a. 1989.
  • Verena Auffermann : The open dress. From Giorgione to Tiepolo . Essays. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-8270-0309-6 .
Chapter: Pale Sebastian. Giovanni Bellini's legend of the better life. Pp. 55-74.
  • Graziella Magherini, Antonio Paolucci , Anchise Tempestini: La terrazza del mistero. La allegoria sacra di Giovanni Bellini, analisi storico-filologica e interpretazione psicoanalitica . Florence: Nicomp 2004.

Web links

Commons : Sacred Allegory by Giovanni Bellini  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gustav Ludwig: Giovanni Bellini's so-called Madonna at the lake in the Uffizi, a religious allegory, in: Yearbook of the Royal Prussian Art Collections. 23rd vol., 3rd / 4th H. 1902, pp. 163-186
  2. ^ Günter Brucher: History of the Venetian Painting. Volume 2. Vienna: Böhlau 2010. p. 137.
  3. ↑ Antonio Natali, Marianta Signorini: Restoration: "Allegoria Sacra" from Giovanni Bellini , accessed on May 27, 2020
  4. ^ A Room of One's Own: The Studiolo , Italian Renaissance Learning. Studies, accessed May 27, 2020
  5. ↑ Ludger Grenzmann u. a. (Ed.): Mutual tensions between the religions in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Berlin: De Gruyter 2020. p. 142