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Part
5
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MADONNA COL
BAMBINO E SAN GIOVANNINO
(Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John)
Attributed to Sebastiano Mainardi
or Jacopo del Sellaio
(Firenze, Palazzo Vecchio Museum, Sala d'Ercole)
The Madonna and Child with
the infant St. John, on display in the Sala d'Ercole in Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence, has been variously attributed. The Museum tag says "Jacopo
del Sellaio", but the catalog entry under no. 00292620 reads
that the painting is best attributed to
Sebastiano Mainardi (1466-1513), member of the clique of Ghirlandaio that worked
in Florence at the end of '400. It is also stated that there are some remarkable
resemblances with works of
Lorenzo
di Credi, especially in the figure of the Madonna.
This is the painting that more than any other has sparked discussions among
ufologists, who see in the upper-right scene behind the Madonna the proof
of a "close encounter" with an un-identified flying object. In the
above mentioned scene we see a character keeping a hand to his forehead and
looking towards an apparition in the sky. With him there is a dog, which also
looks towards the strange object.
In an
article
by Daniele Bedini on
Notiziario
UFO n. 7 (Jul-Aug 1996) it says:
«we clearly see the presence
of an airborne object leaden in color and inclined to port, sporting a "dome"
or "turret", apparently identifiable as an oval-shaped moving flying
device».
But this is not the only peculiarity
of the painting: for example, to the upper left we see the Nativity Star
with
three other small stars, or perhaps flames. A very similar detail is present
in the Madonna of the Book (1480) by Sandro Botticelli
These particulars - three stars,
a luminous cloud - tell us that this painting follows an ancient iconography,
an austere and rigid way for interpreting not only sacred subjects but city
life itself, which had been preached by Fra' (Brother) Girolamo Savonarola,
and precisely in the Florence of the end of the 15-th century. After the Medici
family had been driven out, Florence declared the Republic, which Savonarola
oriented in a teocratic fashion, exerting a pervasive surveillance of the
people and their ways (nowadays we could draw a parallel with the Islam fundamentalists
of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran Republic), even to the point of the "vanity
bonfires", where game cards, dices, wigs and fineries together with trinkets
and baubles, books considered obscene and even pictures and precious objects
were gathered and set on fire.
Savonarola's preachings greatly influenced works of art of the period and
several artists, for example Sandro Botticelli, reneged their own preceding
works as heathen, and set to represent
mystical
subjects in a "purer", but also more rigid, archaic and didascalic
style.
The religious symbology which
we find in this Madonna is therefore in line with this older iconography that
in the Florence of the humanism and Neo-Platonism had been lost. The three
stars, for example, appear often in the paintings of the previous century,
and especially in the
byzantine
icons of the Madonna; often, they were painted on her
veil,
on the shoulders and forehead; other times they are replaced by
three
rays; they always represent the "threefold virginity" of the
Madonna, i.e., before, during, and after the virgin birth. The three stars,
in the same meaning, are also found on the
coat
of arms of the
Oratorian
order of Saint Filippo Neri (hence, also called "Filippini"),
who are particularly devout to the Madonna.
Returning to the above mentioned
detail, the one that was interpreted as an UFO, we see that it is to be found
in a great many "Nativities" of the '400 and '500. It is but the
announcement to the shepherds, as told in St. Luke's Gospel:
«...and there were in
the same country shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch over their flock
by night. And lo, an angel of the Lord come upon them, and the glory of the
Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said
unto them, Fear ye not: for behold!, I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people. For unto you was born this day in the city of
David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord...»
We can see this scene represented
in much the same way of the Madonna with Child of Palazzo Vecchio in many
other paintings of the Nativity or the Adoration of the Child:
Also another "tondo",
attributed to the school of Sebastiano Mainardi and on display at
Sommariva
Perno, shows the same scene of a
shepherd
who, with a hand to his forehead and a dog at his side, looks towards the
apparition of the red-dressed Angel. And in the center, above the Madonna's
head, there is the same light-rayed cloud.
Also in the Adorazione dei
Magi by Domenico Ghirlandaio we find both the angel and the luminous cloud,
and even in this painting someone finds "unidenitified fliying objects"
(http://www.teegeeack.com/alien-ufo-secret-ufo-video-photo.html)
Also
in this Nativity, from a Book Of Prayers of Sforza family (1500),
we recognize the luminous cloud, full of little angels:
In the
Nativity
by Lorenzo Monaco (1409), we find the same cloud over the Madonna, while the
Angel comes out of a similar cloud to make his announcement to the shepherds.
We can therefore safely identify
in the Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John exposed in Palazzo
Vecchio the same announcement scene which is described by the Gospel of Luke.
But one might wonder, since there is no talk of "luminous clouds"
in Luke, whence could this particular have come from?
In the Renaissance sacred art,
there were represented not only scenes taken from the four canonical Gospels.
Artists, often,took their inspirations from more recent devotional texts,
containing characters and situations with more popular and narrative streaks.
To these texts we owe Mary's Presentation to the Temple, or the Virgin's
Wedding, painted by Giotto; the encounter between Jesus and Saint John
the Baptist painted by Leonardo in "The virgin of the rocks";
are all subjects deriving from sources extraneous to the Gospels of Mark,
Matthew, Luke or John. Painters (and their employers, who decided the subjects)
often mixed scenes and situations from heterogeneous texts, for example the
"Golden Legend", by Jacopo da Varazze, or the several apocryphal
gospels.
One of the apocryphal gospels
most heavily used as source of subjects for the artists of this period is
James'
Protogospel. And it is there that we find a description of the Nativity
in which no angels appear, replaced by (you guessed it) a cloud of light
as well as a mid-wife:
[19, 2] «They stood in the place of the cave, and behold!, a luminous
cloud over-shadowed the cave. And the mid-wife said: My soul has beenmagnified
this day, because mine eyes have seen wondrous things: that salvation has
been brought forth to Israel. And immediately the cloud disappeared out of
the cave, and a great light shone in the cave that the eyes could not bear
it» ("Apocryphal Gospels", edited by Marcello Craveri,
Torino, 1969, p. 21 italian edition).
We notice a difference from St.
Luke, who said that «and the glory of he Lord shone round about them».
Here, the author adds that «the eyes could not bear it».
And behold!, in many paintings we can see how the shepherd doth shadow his
eyes with the hand.
In the same Protogospel we find
a description of the Star, but what's more, we also read how the infant St.
John had to flee from Herod:
[22, 1] «And, when Herod knew that he had been mocked by the Magi,
in a rage did he send murderers saying unto them: Slay the children from two
years old, and under. [2]And Mary, having heard that the children were being
killed, was afraid, and took the infant, and swaddled Him, and put Him into
an ox-stall. [3]Elizabeth too having heard that they were searching for John,
took him, and went up into the hill-country, and kept looking for where to
conceal him. But, there was no place of concealment. And, Elizabeth groaning
in a loud voice said: O Mountain of God, receive a mother and her child! And,
immediately the mountain was cleft and received her. And a light shone about
them for an Angel of the Lord was with them to watch over them.»
And it came to pass, that in this passage of the Protogospel of James the
light was identified with a guardian angel, without him appearing in person.
The depiction of the cloud alone,
without the Angel, is rare, but one example can be seen in a painting by
Master
Franke, on the Adoration of the Child. This same author elsewhere
shows God Himself within the cloud, while an angel makes the announcement
to the shepherds:
Marco Bussagli wrote several books
on the iconography of the Angels. In particular in "History of Angels"
(Rusconi, 1991) he quotes pseudo Dionigi stating that:
«The Holy
Scriptures represent them in the form of clouds to indicate that the holy
entities are filled with a hidden light in an above-mundane way, and simply
host the first light at its first emanation...».
The same Bussagli,
in the catalogue of "Wings of God", writes:
«All
things considered the Middle Ages turned out to be a central period for the
development of the Angels iconography, whose solutions were to be re-interpreted
in a markedly naturalistic way by the later culture of Renaissance and Baroque.
Such is the case of the 'Cloud Angels', that would be later propounded
as winged figures over soft cushions of vapour.» (http://www.enec.it/AliDio/09e_Iconografia.pdf)
Sano di Pietro, the Angel from "Annunciation
to the Shepherds" (mid XV century)
We can, then, link the "tondo"
with the Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John with the iconographical
tradition of that period, the end of the '400 in Florence. The archaic detail
of the three stars symbol of the threefold virginity of Mary, and the painting
of the Angel not as an anthropomorphic character but as a "cloud of light",
make us think of an adhering on the part of the author to the teachings of
Girolamo Savonarola, the Domenican monk who preached a return to tradition
and purity in the arts as well as in city life.
In the catalogue entry of
the Palazzo Vecchio Museum for this painting, it reads that there are "striking
similarities" with works of Lorenzo di Credi. And it may be worthy of
note that Lorenzo di Credi was one of the most devout among the followers
of Savonarola, arriving to the burning of every drawing of nude he ever made,
and finally to becoming himself a monk.
Conclusions:
In the painting
named Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John, probably made
by Sebastiano Mainardi (school of Ghirlandaio) there are no UFOs. The three
little stars under the great Nativity Star are symbols of the
triple
virginity of Mary (before, during and after the childbirth), The shepherd
with the hand on the forehead is similar to many other shepherds in dozens
of Nativity or Adoration paintings of the same age; and the
lighting cloud, symbol of the God's Glory, comes from the narration
of the nativity in the
Protogospel
of James
(chapter 2, 19).
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