Adoration of the Magi

~~At the dawn of the Quattrocento, a Gothic coloring system matched the Christian culture. Abundant gold symbolized the celestial sphere; a white gesso ground enhanced the brilliance of the pigments bound in egg, which were used in their pure form to maximize their luminosity. As the humanist view gradually gained ground, Christian...

We take for granted the transition from Early to High Renaissance in Florence, as if the new half-millennium automatically engendered the new style. We fail to recognize the extent to which it is a new style, and not the necessary next phase of Renaissance naturalism. It is hard to envisage how the new beginning of what Wölfflin would call “the classic style” would have...

So advised Paolo da Certaldo in his mid-fourteenth-century book of behavioral guidance. Though the spiritual gaze might seem awkwardly bifocal, with one eye raised and the other lowered, the injunction rests on great authority.