Looking Beyond Lippi

The Michelozzan features in these three altarpieces are important, for they introduced Fra Carnevale to the work of the leading architect of Medicean Florence. We should not be surprised that motifs derived from Michelozzo's buildings become part of the repertory of the Urbino painter. Especially important for his work was the marble doorway to the novitiate chapel (fig. 22), its architrave decorated with a frieze of cherub heads and swags supported by beautiful Corinthian capitals and fluted pilasters of great elegance. Similarly, the project to decorate the courtyard of the Medici palace with roundels based on classical gems may have provided the germ for the classicizing reliefs that Fra Carnevale introduced into his paintings of the Birth of the Virgin and Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple(?) (cat. 45a, b).

Beginning in 1448 Michelozzo was engaged in a number of collaborative projects that included the bronze founder and sculptor Maso di Bartolomeo and also Luca della Robbia. In his marble tabernacles in San Miniato al Monte (fig. 23) and the Santissima Annunziata, both funded by Piero de'Medici, an effect of incomparable richness was created by elaborately carved details or by employing mismatched capitals to suggest the reuse of classical fragments (spolie). At San Miniato al Monte, Luca della Robbia provided a glazed-terracotta vault that introduced a further element of polychromy, and he did the same for Piero de'Medici's study in the Medici palace (see cat. 25). From 1449 to 1451 both Maso and Luca would be involved in the construction of the first example of Renaissance architecture in Urbino: the portal of the church of San Domenico (fig. 1), a project that was influenced by these and other Florentine models but attained its own, quite individual, character. Fra Carnevale is cited in several of the relevant documents and may well have played a vital role in that innovative architectural undertaking, conceivably submitting the same kind of drawings he did several years later, in 1455, for the cathedral of Urbino (see the document discovered by Mazzaluppi). Fra Carnevale's ties to Maso di Bartolomeo surely originated during the time he spent in Florence: Might he have been responsible for involving Maso and Luca della Robbia in the project?

As Matteo Ceriano demonstrates in his exploratory essay, from the outset Fra Carnevale had a greater intrinsic interest in architecture than did Lippi, just as he was more fascinated with perspective. It is, therefore, not surprising to find him looking further afield than Lippi for inspiration: not just to the work of painters, but to that of architects and sculptors as well. He must have taken the opportunity to study Ghiberti's progress on the Gates of Paradise, with their elegant figural style and brilliant use of architectural settings—"buildings done with reason . . . so that standing back from them they appear in relief."71

Uccello's extraordinary fresco of the Flood (fig. 25) in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella, with its tunneling perspective and figures scattered so as to impart narrative interest through the composition, with witty interpolations to the biblical story, also left an enormous impression on Fra Carnevale, as did the bifocal perspective structure of Uccello's (detached) fresco of the Nativity (Uffizi, Florence) from Santa Maria della Scala.72 Fra Carnevale employed a similar perspective structure for his two panels of the Birth of the Virgin and Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple(?) (cat. 45a, b). By having the orthogonals recede to the left in one and to the right in the other he at once united them conceptually while separating their visual content. It is probably not coincidental that those two panels—the core of this exhibition—were painted in the very years that Uccello was in Urbino at work on the predella of the altarpiece (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino) for the Urbino Confraternità del Corpus Domini.

Along with the conceitful art of Uccello, Fra Carnevale was also drawn to the elevated, sacred drama of Fra Angelico's San Marco Altarpiece (fig. 3). Fra Angelico left Florence for Rome in 1445, working for both Eugenius IV and Nicholas V, but his absence from the Florentine scene did not diminish the impact of that extraordinary work. The predella, containing scenes from the legends of Saints Cosmas and Damian, established a new level of sophistication in the use of the geometry of perspective and of architecture to articulate a narrative (see fig. 24). Angelico did not share the interest of Domenico Veneziano and Donatello (who was in Padua from 1444 to 1453) in manipulating perspective to establish an emotional tone; he preferred a more normative scheme, with a centralized vanishing point. He then used architecture to give visual emphasis to a composition by providing a geometric scaffolding for the figural content. It was this aspect of Angelico's art that so strongly impressed Piero della Francesca. What seems to have especially attracted Fra Carnevale was Angelico's use of light—a light seemingly filtered through a crystal, acquiring a jewel-like intensity—to give a quality of heightened experience to his depictions of interior spaces. It is this crystalline light that illuminates the chamber behind the Virgin in the Annunciation (cat. 19) painted for the wealthy French merchant Jacques Coeur. If we compare that painting with Filippo Lippi's Annunciation (fig. 5) for Le Murate, we cannot help but be struck by the way its author—plausibly although by no means certainly identifiable as Fra Carnevale73—has transformed the art of his mentor. Architecture and space predominate. The recession of the arcade behind the angel and details such as the bronze gate—patterned on Maso di Bartolomeo's grille in the cathedral of Prato (illustrated in the catalogue, p. 182)—are described with the care of an amateur architect-designer.

We still know remarkably little of Fra Carnevale's activity in Florence, and the fact that the authors of this catalogue express differing ideas about what he may have painted in the 1440s indicates the speculative nature of the task of its reconstruction. Did he assume the position of senior assistant in Lippi's shop, entrusted with executing devotional works based on the master's design: such as the Lippesque paintings of the Madonna and Child in Baltimore and in Hannover (cat. 7)?74 Did this activity lead, in turn, to more independent works, such as the Madonna and Child in Bergamo (cat. 18)?75 Was a commission like the one for Jacques Coeur's Annunciation placed through Lippi, or did Fra Carnevale (its hypothetical painter) manage to receive independent commissions—despite his never having joined the painters' guild? The Annunciation (cat. 40) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., can be traced to the Strozzi collection—albeit only in the nineteenth century—suggesting that Fra Carnevale did, indeed, have Florentine clients. At present we do not know how long he remained with Lippi or whether his initial stay in Florence was reprised later on. There is, indeed, a void between the mention of Fra Carnevale in Lippi's shop on September 7, 1446, and the notice of his presence in Urbino on December 9, 1449, by which time he had taken holy orders at the convent of San Domenico. For the next two decades his career as a friar, priest, painter, and architectural adviser (the order of priority was not necessarily constant) was intimately bound up with the transformation of Urbino into one of the foremost centers of Renaissance culture—a transformation based in no small degree on what Fra Carnevale, like Piero della Francesca before him, had experienced in Florence in the 1440s.