Reviewed by Nora Hamerman
Special to the Herald
(From the issue of 2/24/05)

Make a pilgrimage, both artistic and spiritual, to New York during this Lenten season. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, walk up the grand staircase and into a gallery focused on the Met’s new acquisition, the "Madonna and Child" by Duccio. Then walk down the great stairway and behind it to the Lehman Wing, where you can immerse yourself in the splendors of "From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master," on view Feb. 1 through May 1.

The first exhibit, which continues until March 13, showcases the first picture to enter the Met’s collection by Duccio. He is considered, together with Giotto, one of the two founders of Italian art. The small, 700-year-old panel of the Virgin and Child standing behind a parapet was until recently the only Duccio still in private hands. The Met’s curators have garlanded their new prize with other 14th century pictures in their collection, including precious images of the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ by Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini — the greatest masters of the era.

The Christ Child in Duccio’s painting clutches the veil of His mother. The gesture seems natural, yet together with the mother’s dreamy beauty, it is highly significant. The Son of God "veils" His divinity under the flesh that He assumes from Mary. The meditative air of the Virgin alludes to the supreme act of humility — in the flesh He assumed, the Son of God will die on the cross for sinners.

This gesture often recurs in pictures from the first flowering of the Renaissance, the subject of the "Fra Carnevale" exhibit, which assembles works from collections around the United States and Europe. In 1434, Pope Eugene IV fled to Florence, seeking protection from the Roman nobility who resented his reforming and ascetic ways. Surrounded by his court of brilliant humanists, the pontiff’s arrival sparked an incandescence of artistic creativity, patronized by the Medici banking family. The foremost living artist was the saintly Dominican friar we know as Fra Angelico. His contemporary, the less pious but equally gifted Carmelite brother Fra Filippo Lippi, is the first pivotal figure in the Met show.

Filippo Lippi was appreciated as one of the most inventive artists of his day. He kept the love of bright color, gold touches and decorative line typical of Gothic art, and merged it with the new science of perspective and anatomy. Often he portrays Church teachings as they might have been heard in popular sermons. One of his most touching interpretations of the Annunciation, for example, depicts the cast shadow of the Blessed Virgin in a way that suggests how the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" her. A wall text invokes a sermon by St. Antoninus, the Florentine bishop (1389-1459): "The body of humanity will assume in Mary the incorporeal light of God."

Between Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolommeo, the Dominican friar who became one of Italy‘s greatest artists around 1500, scholars have pieced together the career of a third Dominican artist, one Fra Carnevale. Fra Carnevale stands out in a group of artists who worked in Lippi’s studio in the 1440s. He trained in Florence, associated with the leading names of Renaissance artists, became a Dominican friar, advised the ruler of his native Urbino on art and architecture, and painted some of the era’s most fascinating works before his death in 1484. Yet his identity long remained a mystery.

Fra Carnevale, until recently, was known as the enigmatic "Master of the Barberini Panels." Two large paintings of scenes from the Life of the Virgin Mary (based on ancient traditions, not Scripture), set in a splendid classical architecture and filled with descriptive details of everyday life, were once in the Barberini collection. The "Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple" was sold to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, while the Metropolitan got the "Birth of the Virgin." The two panels are not only reunited for this show, but scholars have finally figured out that both once belonged to Fra Carnevale’s most famous altarpiece, made for the church of Santa Mary della Bella in Urbino.

Many of the paintings and sculptures had been "museumized" away from their original context, in altarpieces that would have been served as the backdrop at the moment when the priest elevated the Host and it became the true Body of Christ. One aim of this exhibit is to reveal the limitless variety of personalities and local dialects through which the eucharistic miracle could be expressed in the Renaissance. It is particularly wonderful that in some cases, the separated parts of the altarpieces have been reunited for the show.

A selection of the finest work of a who’s who of the Early Renaissance — sculptors Donatello and Della Robbia, painters Pesellino, Domenico Veneziano and Piero della Francesca — rounds out the show.