Figures, Grounds, and Gold: Relocating the Madonna of Humility

 

Saskia C. Quené •  University of California, Berkeley

 

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Recommended Citation: Saskia C. Quené, “Figures, Grounds, and Gold: Relocating the Madonna of Humility,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 9 (2023). https.//doi.org/10.61302/YAGI7299.

 

This paper examines figures, grounds, and gold in two panel paintings by Fra Angelico with restricted accessibility: His Madonna dell’Umiltà from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia (fig. 1) and his Virgin and Child from The Alana Collection (fig. 2).[1] I initially draw attention to the interplay of forms, lines, metals, and pigments through close looking and material analysis. In doing so, I explore Angelico’s representation of humility, arguing that the painter and monk reflects on the close connection between “humilitas” (humility) and “humus” (ground) visually, theologically, and theoretically, enabling contemplation on the subject of “ground.” To better comprehend Angelico’s visual strategies, I connect his way of employing materials and techniques to observations of the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. Yet, this essay nevertheless critiques the usage of modernist terms like “figure” and “ground,” and proposes to expand the iconographic scope of the Madonna dell’Umiltà by discussing the place of “ground” in gold leaf panel painting.

 

 

Covering ground

Thinly hammered gold leaf covers almost the entire surface of Fra Angelico’s Madonna dell’Umiltà from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, from the top near the now-lost frame to the very bottom of the wooden panel (fig. 1).[2] In the staggered layers of metal, paints, and pigments, it is precious gold that provides the ground for the depiction of the seated Virgin. Mary is dressed in a red garment, a dark blue cloak, and a golden nimbus. Complemented by a diaphanous veil, delicate golden linings on the trim of her blue mantle define the lavish robe that lies in heavy folds across the floor. She rests on a slender silk pillow while holding the Christ child on the left knee.

 

The picture plane can be divided into two zones: At the top, two angels in vivid crimson silks stand out against the gilded surface. Here, the three nimbi guide the play of light in the gleaming ground. In the lower part, two haloed angels with instruments turn their colorful and sharply foreshortened wings toward the spectator, while the plane is dominated by the intricate design of a textile. Calyxes, vines, and birds, spirals, and star-shaped ornaments form a dense weave that remains parallel to the picture plane. Reversing their realities, the two pairs of angels stand out against two distinct grounds and, in this case, realms. The panel’s lower margin is marked by the base of a golden vase holding three white lilies (fig. 4).

 

Mary’s locus, her place within the pictorial space bounded by the lower red-and-gold textile and the upper gold ground, remains unstable. With dark blue pigment standing out against the gold leaf, the shape of her figure appears as a solid form against her surroundings. Her body is contoured almost sculpturally, while the outlines of the vase and the slender silk pillow graphically emphasize the absence of a throne.[3] In refraining from straining any volume, the pillow almost blends in with the vegetal pattern of the red-and-gold textile (fig. 5). Likewise, the figure of the vase with the three lilies remains emphatically un-contoured. Nothing beyond its outline sets the depicted object apart from the red-and-gold fabric. Finally, a third distinctive method used by Fra Angelico to distinguish forms can be observed in the red-and-gold fabric itself. Here, Fra Angelico relies entirely on the material distinction between red color and gold leaf.

 

Fra Angelico covers the precious gold leaf with layers of red paint. This superimposition of red hue creates ambiguity: Although the red paint forefronts the gold leaf by outlining the pattern of the cloth, the eyes observe gold leaf applications running from the very top of the panel throughout the bottom edge as a base or background. The calyxes, birds, vines, spirals, and star-shaped ornaments appear as golden figures on a crimson ground, instead of the other way around. Thick coats of luster paint produce an opaque red that covers the precious gold to provide a new pictorial ground—an observation I will return to.

Just a few years after his Madonna dell’Umiltà, Fra Angelico created his Virgin and Child from The Alana Collection between the years of 1420 and 1422 (fig. 2).[4] Mary is dressed in a golden halo, a red garment, and a dark blue cloak. The Christ child sits on the Virgin’s left knee held by her left hand. The plane is dominated by shades of gold, red, and blue, and split horizontally into two sections: The upper half of the panel’s polished gold leaf is left unadorned, while the floor under the Madonna shines in opaque, brilliant red. Also, Mary is seated in a Savonarola chair with lions’ heads and paws rather tab on a modest silk pillow. Between the upper gold ground and the lower red ground, countless delicate lines, punched dots, and a thin layer of red glazing luster paint contour a cloth of honor dressing the chair in the back behind the Madonna.

Placing planes

Fra Angelico’s Virgin and Child from The Alana Collection is not considered to be an example for the iconography of the Madonna of Humility.[5] In his seminal essay from 1936, Millard Meiss speculative idea of a “lost prototype”[6] as the earliest example of the iconography of the Madonna of Humility resulted in a simple but surprisingly effective definition: The Madonna of Humility is defined by “the single fact that she was seated on the ground.”[7]

Why, one must wonder, is precisely the ground—a term that can also mean “earth,” “background,” or “primer,”[8]—a distinguishing feature of the iconography? Isidor of Seville provides a justification for the significance of the ground beneath the Madonna dell’Umiltà: “Humilis, quasi humo acclinis.”[9] Hence, the term humilitas can be etymologically derived from humus,[10] which translates to “soil,” “earth,” or “field.” In the Italian and Latin term campo (which conveys all connotations of the Latin “humus”), in turn, we find the words campeggiare (“fielding,” calling to mind the English “camping”) and campire, by which the act of “fielding” or “coloring” a panel or canvas is described.[11] Even the Greek word ταπεινός (humble) already contains the root πατέω, “walk,” “tread on,” and “trample on.”[12] The concept of the “humility” is thus solidly rooted in “ground.”

However, even more significant for the painter and Dominican monk Fra Angelico must have been the fact that humility as a virtue and corporeal expression occupied a central position within daily monastic life rather that the fact that the great Dominican scholar Thomas Aquinas himself discussed the etymological relation between humus and humilitas.[13] In bowing, kneeling, and prostration, Dominican servants lowered themselves to the ground to express their devotion and humbleness.

When Millard Meiss alludes to the ground, he refers to the “floor or ground plane under the Madonna.”[14] Meiss is not referring to the primer, gesso, or bole, nor to the background or the gold ground. He is referencing the floor or ground as a depicted place within the pictorial space of the image. According to Meiss, the etymological relationship between the words humilitas and humus allows for the possibility of concisely identifying and determining iconographical types and prototypes. However, I will argue that in Fra Angelico’s portrayal of Marian humility, the humus rather than the “floor or ground plane under the Madonna” becomes the very subject. For Fra Angelico, it is the ground as a field or campo held together by gold leaf and red pigments, that becomes the foundation for depicting humilitas.

Brilliant fabrics

The grounds’ gold leaf and red colors in Fra Angelico’s Madonna dell’Umiltà evoke a luxurious textile. Contradictory, the humble Virgin is, therefore, not only set in gold but also surrounded by precious fabrics. This paradox can be dissolved by contextualizing the virtue of humility theologically: “Like a valuable precious stone in gold, humility is the jewel of all virtues,” writes, for example, the Carthusian monk Nikolaus Kempf in the mid-fourteenth century in his Expositiones Mysticae in Cantica Canticorum.[15] In comparison, Augustine and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas explicitly regard humility as the root of all virtues: Only on the foundation of humilitas (humility) could virtues like caritas (charity) and pietas (piety) flourish.[16] Thus it comes as no surprise that Angelico used gold leaf as the foundation for his figuration of the Madonna of Humility.[17]

The Madonna dell’Umiltà’s gold-and-red fabric has no discernible pattern repeat.[18] While navigating the all-over, the eye only gradually discovers seven variations of an exotic bird amid calyxes and vines. Three of them can be found on the right side of the pictorial field, two of them can be seen in the center with their wings extended, a sixth is partially hidden by the gold vase on the bottom edge, and the feathers of a seventh bird are concealed between the two wings of the angel performing music on the left.

Although the vegetative design, the exotic birds, and the red and gold colors of the weave would permit distant comparisons to Central Asian fabrics, the red-and-gold textile of the Madonna dell’Umiltà from the Hermitage cannot be identified based on its aesthetic characteristics: No fabric produced on a loom could have such free and endlessly variable embellishments as the cloth in Fra Angelico’s Madonna dell’Umiltà. Moreover, from the panel painting itself, it is impossible to determine whether the fabric would depict a brocade weft or a silk with a weft lancé. On the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century, gold threads in silks were introduced as brocade wefts and hence did not traverse the entire fabric’s back. The gold thread in these textiles, like in tapestry, corresponds only to the width of a particular element within the overall pattern rather than running from selvage to selvage (from one rim of the fabric to the opposite end). Gold threads wouldn’t be covered by red silk just to be invisible.

As a parallel to the technique of putting down gold leaf on a panel, one would have to imagine a fabric in which the gold thread runs on the back of the cloth and remains, much like in the panel painting, partially unseen. A convincing analogy between a weaving technique and the technique used by Fra Angelico would only exist if the gold thread could be stretched on the loom as the warp. Yet, there is no evidence of a red and gold lampas of that kind in the history of textiles. Ironically, gold threads are too frail to be spread out as a “gold ground.”[19] Only in painting can precious metal serve as the foundation for the representation of the virtue of humility.

To model the gold cloth of honor of the Madonna dell’Umiltà now in Turin (fig. 6), Fra Angelico used a blunt needle to trace a pattern. Nothing but light falling on the hatched tracings makes the imaginative weave on the surface of the gold leaf visible. Strictly arranged in a ninety-degree angle, the pattern is seen either as bright figures on a dark ground or as dark figures on a luminous ground (figs. 7 and 8). On a technical level, Fra Angelico’s way of tooling the gold leaf recalls damasks, which are patterned textiles that most remarkably use one single kind of thread in just one color to alternate warp-faced and weft-faced elements in their patterns. Depending on the lighting, a damask’s pattern repeat appears either as a brilliant pattern on a dark ground or as a shaded pattern on a luminous ground. Yet, Fra Angelico’s envisioned gold damask remains a fiction that materializes only on the surface of the picture plane, for no damask can be created with threads spun from gold.

 

 

 

While colleagues like Gentile da Fabriano had already mimicked the splendor of real fabrics, one can only draw the conclusion that Fra Angelico did not wish to depict a fabric that could directly correspond to a known textile.[20] Yet, Fra Angelico’s inventiveness rested on his aptitude for careful observation and his knowledge of weaving techniques, which allowed him to push them past their boundaries in his paintings. His penchant for experimenting with his own painting techniques and materials drove him to bold fictions of materials, as is certainly also true for his shimmering-silky red-and-gold-cloth adorning the Savonarola chair in his Virgin and Child from The Alana Collection.

Leveling layers

But why then would Fra Angelico depict gold-and-red-textiles exceeding the splendor of the finest silks in Florence? To answer this question, it is necessary to distinguish between the formal, iconographical, and theological functions of the represented textiles.

Suppose we understand the gold ground in Angelico’s Virgin and Child from The Alana Collection as serving the formal function of the campo while the opaque red—in this case—marks the floor, the question arises of how the cloth of honor behind Mary fits into this structure. On the one hand, the lively texture of the tooled gold creating the drappo d’oro becomes a three-dimensionally perceptible object within the pictorial space.[21] On the other hand, the glazed gold refracts and reflects the incoming light while taking on the formal function of a gold plane. Therefore, the golden cloth of honor is revealed to be neither a purely self-referential assertion of material nor an object that can be clearly concretized within the depicted space. Its unstable ambiguity lies between the picture plane and the pictorial space, and, therefore, between figures, grounds, and gold.

The golden cloth of honor is revealed neither as a ground nor as a figure, but as both at the same time. The dual formal function of the fabric can be theorized using Edgar Rubin’s example of a Face-as-Vase, which I shall return to later, or Richard Wollheim’s vocabulary of “seeing-in” and his concept of “twofoldness.”[22] On the other hand, Fra Angelico extends the formal “twofoldness” of his cloth into the hypostatic union of Christ himself. As both fully man and fully God, the cloths’ status as both figure and ground becomes the ὑπόστασις (hypostasis), the “foundation,” “substance,” or “subsistence” of the panel painting. Angelico’s representation of Marian humility through his fabric is, in fact, Christological.

Through the depiction of the gold-and-red cloth, countless lines and dots bear light onto the surface, evoking the incarnating Christ as the “light of the world” (John 8:12).[23] The depiction of the subject of the Incarnation as a moment of illumination comes to life in the golden refracting and reflecting light and in the transparent red luster paint that creates the cloth on the panel’s surface. These two elements, red and gold, appear again as a contrast between the gold ground and the red floor, Mary’s bright red garment and the naked, almost golden body of Christ, in Christ’s red-and-gold nimbus, and emphasized by the red grapes in Mary’s right hand, for which the Child is reaching. The red pigment matter is, quite literally, not only referring to Christ’s Passion, but also to Mary’s prima materia, her blood from which the body of Christ is created.[24] Her red garment, which provides a new ground to the Child on her lap,[25] is once again revealed neither as a figure nor as a ground—but as both at once.

Fra Angelico’s invitation to contemplate on the matter of “ground” reaches the viewer through his skilled layering of materials and through his innovative and subtle iconography, subversively reaching new heights while unfolding figures, grounds, and gold grounds.

Handling gold leaf

Techniques for working gold leaf, such as punching, granulation or stippling, chasing, engraving, and tracing, or pastiglia, sgraffito, and mordant gilding techniques were not invented in the Quattrocento.[26] Jaroslav Folda and Mojmír Frinta have shown how the chrysographic techniques used in Byzantine icons—which rely in turn on Roman models—can be seen in Italian panel paintings from the thirteenth century. Especially lavish ornaments, as well as decorated nimbi and fields of polished gold leaf, were created in Florence in the fourteenth century. On the other hand, punching techniques and heightening with pastiglia persisted throughout the sixteenth century, especially in Siena and northern Italy.

Few of the panel paintings by Fra Angelico use pastiglia to heighten the surface; instead they feature even more refined sgraffito and mordant gilding techniques. Moreover, Angelico utilized shell gold and silver leaf, added delicate particles of silicon glitter to the plaster of his frescoes, and used transparent luster paints, which he applied directly to the gold leaf. For instance, Fra Angelico uses a thin but blunt wooden needle to define the finest vines, spirals, and birds’ feathers in addition to painting red over gold leaf. In scratching off the red paint, even more gleaming gold can be exposed.[27] By contrast, mordant gilding refers to a technique in which a thin brush is used to apply a size to the dry layer of paint.[28] Only the areas where the sizing was previously placed are where the gold leaf adheres. As soon as the size has dried, the excess gold leaf is removed with a feather. In this case, burnishing the applied gold leaf is usually neither possible nor desirable.

While mordant gilding techniques were used to render the divine illumination of the Hodegretia, sgraffito techniques were preferred in the West. While Cennini notes that mordant gilding is not a very frugal method, since the tiny flakes of gold leaf that do not stick to the size can only be processed into shell gold or used for the smallest of corrections, it is surprising that he makes no mention of the significant amount of gold that remains hidden, invisible beneath the paint when applying sgraffito techniques.[29]

As we have seen, the representation of the Madonna of Humility encourages creative ways to layer materials. In Fra Angelico’s Madonna dell’Umiltà from the Hermitage, large parts of the golden surface remain disguised from the viewer’s gaze. Contemplating the “ground” as the foundation of humility, Fra Angelico foregrounds complexity: Planes became levels that superimpose new layers, emphasizing gold at its foundation. When it comes to Fra Angelico and his depictions of the humble Madonna, the question, therefore, is not anymore, how precious gold can be suitable to represent humility, but if gold leaf is a necessary feature to figurate the Madonna of Humility.

Alberti’s appeal

The traditional narrative of the supposed disappearance of gold leaf over the course of the Quattrocento often begins with Leon Battista Alberti. In chapter 49 of De Pictura and Della Pittura,[30] he calls for the gleam of gold to be evoked not by applying gold leaf but by employing paint:[31]

In fact, as the admiration and greater praise of an artist is based on colors, thus also one can observe that, after you have placed gold on a flat panel, the major parts of [those] surfaces that one needed to represent as bright and brilliant appear dark to the observers; and others [surfaces], perhaps, which should be darker, result more luminous.[32]

Contrary to the reception of this oft-cited passage as proof for the regression of gold leaf in Italian panel painting, Alberti never mentions the campo d’oro, or gold ground. Moreover, Ceninno Cennini noted in his Libro dell’arte three decades earlier that gold could appear not only brightly lit but also dark and shaded. Alberti’s concern thus seems to have been something different.

In section 48, Alberti first explains the arrangements of genres of color using an example:

Grace, without doubt, will result when colors will be combined with colors with a certain accurate diligence, as, for example, if you paint Diana while she leads choruses, it is convenient that green clothes are assigned to this nymph, to that next one white, to this one who precedes, purple, to [the other] who follows, yellow. And one after another, let them be dressed, indeed, according to a variety of such colors, that bright colors always match with some dark colors of a different kind.[33]

A few lines later, in section 49, it is not the garments of Diana’s nymphs that he cites as an argument against gold leaf but rather Dido’s accessories:

But, there are those who utilize gold in a disproportionate way because they think that gold lends a certain majesty to the historia. I do not approve of them at all. Indeed, if I would like to paint Virgil’s Dido with a golden quiver, [who] kept [her] hair in a knot with a golden clasp, [for] whom a golden band girded [her] dress, and who rode with golden reins, and, in general, all things shone because of the gold, I [would] strive, nevertheless, to imitate by means of colors rather than by means of gold that abundance of golden rays that strikes observers’ eyes from every part.[34]

Regrettably, we cannot recreate the painting of Dido Alberti might have had in front of his eyes. However, his specific example clarifies that the flat gold ground cannot be referred to here. Alberti describes a gold quiver, a gold hairband, reins, and golden rays emanating. He is, therefore, referring to mordant gilding, not to the application of multiple gold leaves covering a larger surface.

Rereading the passage from Alberti’s treatise brings forth another reason to question his scepsis towards the use of gold leaf in devotional panel painting: Alberti is referring to a painting with a mythological theme, while Fra Angelico employs gold leaf not only very differently but pursues, as we have seen, a Christological argument. In doing so, Angelico productively recognizes the phenomenon described by Cennini and Alberti of gold appearing either dull or shiny and employs it enthusiastically, as in the gold “damask” for his Madonna of Humility today in Turin and, of course, in the cloth of honor for his panel from The Alana Collection. Fra Angelico recognizes that light changes the color of gold and includes both colors in his palette.

Between figure and ground

The English terms figure, field, ground, background, or the semantically convoluted term plane cannot adequately translate the terms figura and campo, piano and fondo or sfondo.[35] While the panel paintings themselves demand new concepts to comprehend what can be seen between figures and grounds, observations of the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin can help grasp the painter’s visual strategies.

In his dissertation Synsoplevede Figurer: Studier i psykologisk Analyse, Edgar Rubin (1886–1951) searches for “fundamental differences” between “figure” and “ground.” Rubin first states that “what is perceived as figure and what is perceived as ground do not have shape in the same way,”[36] but then observes:

In several cases in which the change from seeing an area as ground to seeing it as figure occurred rather slowly, I experienced how the ground gradually took on a certain shape and became figure. […] Something happens to the ground when it goes over into figure. Especially when it proceeds slowly, it seems that there is something new added to the area which was ground and is becoming figure. The experienced object becomes enriched while changing. This impression is also clear when the reversal of figure and ground occurs suddenly.[37]

In contrast to Joseph Jastrow’s ambiguous image of the duck-rabbit head made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein,[38] Rubin’s work focuses more on the possibility of perceiving forms as figures or as grounds than it does on the dual figure formed by a line (fig. 9). While the terms “figure” and “ground” became fundamental to art critique and art historical scholarship over the course of the twentieth century, this perceptive possibility of seeing figures as grounds and grounds as figures had almost gone forgotten.[39]

 

Edgar Rubin’s vivid description of the possibility of perceptive shifts between figure and ground is what prompts us to revisit Fra Angelico’s gold-and-red textiles once again. Between figures, grounds, and gold, Angelico utilizes planar and spatial layers that develop into layers of meaning, challenging the stability of the viewer’s perception in time. In the Madonna dell’Umiltà from the Hermitage, Mary is lowering her gaze while kept grounded (fig. 10), shifting between becoming a figure or remaining a ground.[40] Within the pictorial space, the ridge of the red-and-gold textile that runs through the center of the image becomes a distant, promising horizon: “Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.” (Luke 1:48).[41] In order to facilitate contemplative reflections on the virtue of humility, Mary nevertheless takes the center stage and transforms into the figure of all figures between planes and pigments.

 

For Millard Meiss and others, Angelico’s Virgin from The Alana Collection would never be a Madonna dell’Umiltà since she is, by all means, seated on a luxurious Savonarola chair rather than sitting on the ground. However, here more than in any other panel painting by Fra Angelico, the “ground” becomes the very subject of his painting. In the temporal movement of perception, the golden cloth of honor is exposed neither as a ground nor as a figure, but as both simultaneously. Angelico strives to renegotiate the relationship between paint and gold and, therefore, between figures, ground, and gold, inviting contemplation on humilitas and humus; mother, matter, and material.[42]

What has been at stake is the question of how Fra Angelico’s Madonne relate to humility and virtue, splendor, and gold at a moment in history when new representational strategies set out to shift the perception and reception of devotional panel painting. Engaging in these debates at a very early stage in his career, Angelico places the blue tip of one of his angel’s wings just millimeters in front of the Virgin’s nimbus, allowing the figure to unfold spatially into the viewer’s realm (fig. 11). In exploring his possibilities, Fra Angelico contributes to these artistic transitions in the first decades of the Quattrocento by relocating the Madonna of Humility within the pictorial space and on the picture plane. In focusing on the grounds surrounding her, he applied layers over layers and challenged the most sumptuous material of all, that is, gold.