Pala Montefeltro

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Pala Montefeltro (Piero della Francesca)
Pala Montefeltro
Piero della Francesca
between 1466 and 1474
Tempera on wood
251 × 172 cm
Pinacoteca di Brera

The Pala Montefeltro , also Pala di Brera or Madonna with Child and Saints and the founder Federico da Montefeltro , is an altarpiece by the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca . The picture shows a Sacra Conversazione : the Madonna with the sleeping child, surrounded by six saints and four angels together with the donor of the picture, Federico da Montefeltro , the Duke of Urbino .

Story of the picture

The picture was probably made by order of Federico da Montefeltro for his mausoleum or his burial chapel; but neither was ever built. After completion, it was placed in the Church of San Donato degli Osservanti in Urbino and probably only after the Duke's death moved to the Osservant Church of San Bernardino, where his tomb is located. In 1811 the picture came into the Brera painting collection in the course of the Napoleonic secularization .

The picture no longer has its original dimensions of the presumed 345 × 190 cm, as it has apparently been trimmed on all sides. Since the original framing can no longer be reconstructed, the Brera shows the picture without a frame.

description

In the center of the picture, Mary sits with the sleeping child on a throne chair, which is set up on a pedestal covered with carpet. She is surrounded by six saints and four angels. On the far right of her stands John the Baptist , the namesake of the duke's wife, Battista Sforza . He carries a staff in his hand and points with his right hand to the sleeping Jesus boy with the gesture of ecce agnus dei, which is characteristic of him . The emaciated saint next to him is the penitent Jerome , who hits his bare chest with the stone. The monk between the two saints is occasionally identified by interpreters as the penitential preacher Bernardine of Siena . On the other side of the Madonna are St. Francis , Petrus Martyr with his head wound and an evangelist dressed in green and red, probably John . Francis, who shows one of his stigmata , holds a transparent, shimmering cross made of gold and rock crystal, as was popular in the churches of northern Italy. This refers to the death of Jesus on the cross.

Four youthful angels stand on the step behind the throne. They are dressed in splendid robes with gold braid, wear chains made of gold, pearls and precious stones and each have a star studded with jewels in their elaborately curly blond hair. Maria originally wore such jewelry in her hair, but it was removed by Pedro Berruguete when the painting was restored . Mary's hair is covered with a delicate veil. She is dressed in a robe made of red and gold brocade with a pomegranate pattern and a wide blue cloak that appears in heavy folds on the pedestal. The baby Jesus sleeps on her knees. Around its neck, it wears a coral branch and a crystal ball on a rosary-like chain of coral balls. The crystal ball in the hands of God the Father and God the Son symbolizes the perfection of the "unbroken highest intelligence" (P. E. Schramm). The corals refer to the blood shed in the passion . Mary has folded her hands in prayer and cast her eyes down. This representation of mother and child, reminiscent of a Pietà , alludes to the death of Christ.

Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro by Piero della Francesca, painted after the same sketch as the donor on the altarpiece

Federico da Montefeltro

Federico da Montefeltro is kneeling at the front right of the picture. He is dressed in armor and a short brocade cloak, the fabric of which resembles the dress of the Madonna, and he is belted with the sword while he has put his helmet, gloves and command staff in front of him. The helmet still shows the traces of the fight in which Federico lost his right eye and almost his life. It is reminiscent of a fateful tournament in which the duke fought with his helmet open to impress a woman he was courting. Because of this carelessness, the enemy smashed his nose and stabbed out his right eye. Federico was later ashamed of his carelessness, in which he had put his life and the well-being of his state at risk. The selection of the saints in the picture, among whom at least the Dominican Petrus Martyr is unusual, can be explained from the spirit of repentance and penance that moved the patron with the thought of death.

Unlike the viewer of the picture, the founder himself, who is blind in the right eye, cannot see the heavenly appearance, for him it remains an inner vision.

Color and space

What is striking about the color design of the picture is the predominance of the color gray, which dominates the picture in various shades and is also repeated - modified in hue and color intensity - in the robes of the saints and the shining armor of the duke. Contrasting colors are - apart from the restrained hues of the marble mirrors - only the few light red color accents of individual garments and details, the oriental carpet on which the throne of the Madonna stands, and the dark red-brown stripe on the cornice that marks the separation from the vaulted area.

In contrast to Dutch altarpieces, hardly anything in the room shown here indicates its sacred purpose; it could also be a room in a secular palace. Due to the mutilation of the image, only narrow stripes or parts of the capitals can be seen of the two massive front pillars on which the arches of the vault rest .

The rear walls and the walls of the apse are structured by fluted pilasters that frame different colored marble mirrors. The apse is vaulted by a mighty coffered barrel vault. The huge white scallop shell that fills the apse calotte is unusual. The shell is a leitmotif in Renaissance architecture, but here it is naturalistically designed exactly like a seashell from the sea. In Christian symbolism , the white shell is a symbol of the motherhood and purity of Mary: Just as the shell carries the precious pearl within itself, so a virgin Mary carried Jesus, the Son of God, within itself.

Another symbol for Mary is the eye-catching ostrich egg suspended from a gold chain . The egg is a common symbol in many religions with a variety of meanings. In ancient Egypt it was a symbol of the afterlife; the church father Augustine interprets it as a symbol of hope. For the theologian Hugo von St. Viktor , the ostrich egg is a symbol of Christ's death and resurrection. Some interpreters interpret the ostrich egg in Piero's picture as a symbol of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

aftermath

The picture was Piero's first large-format altarpiece. It immediately served as a model for altar painting, especially in central and northern Italy, and especially in Venice, although the number of pictures of the Sacra Conversazione type is hardly manageable. Piero broke with the tradition of medieval altarpieces here for the first time, in which the Madonna and the saints are each depicted - in the form of a triptych or polyptych - in their own housings, and the group instead painted in a uniform architectural space. The medieval perspective of meaning , in which the size of the figures is graded according to their rank and importance, no longer plays a role here. Piero arranges his group according to the rules of the central perspective , the iscephaly - the same head height of the figures - he achieves through the different levels of the pictorial space.

The painted space was also laid out by Piero according to principles that he had developed in his theoretical discussions on the problem of perspective representation, which has led to various attempts to mathematically reconstruct the architecture of the Pala. This renewal was also undertaken in Venice and perfected by Giovanni Bellini insofar as he apparently expanded the real church space into the painted picture space in his Pala di San Zaccaria from 1505.

Modern reception

In 1974 Horst Antes created a color lithograph with the title Piero della Francesca's egg .

literature

  • Carlo Bertelli : Piero della Francesca. Life and work of the master of the early Renaissance. Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-7701-3058-8 .
  • G. Ugolino: La Pala di Montefeltro. Una porta per il Mausoleo di Federico. Pesaro 1985.

Individual evidence

  1. Percy Ernst Schramm : Saphira, Globus, Reichsapfel. Stuttgart 1958, pp. 105-106.
  2. Antes: The Egg of Piero della Francesca, color lithograph