DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0075
FLORENCE
§ Angelo and Maddalena Doni
The portraits of Angelo and Maddalena Doni (Plates 46, 47) call us from
the sphere of Court, Church and scholarship into the bourgeois class for which
the young artist had now to work almost exclusively, during his years in Florence.
It is a sign of the ripening maturity of the man of the world that he attained
mastery over so wide a compass, and was capable of characterising with
equal assurance the resolute stolidity of the citizen in the husband or the phleg-
matic self-satisfaction of the wife. Nor is the future monumental painter for
one moment disconcerted by such an incursion into an unfamiliar genre. He
springs upon each model at the outset, as it were, with the only formula that is
appropriate; the sound, forthright, even stately power of this Florentine citizen
Doni reveals itself to the painter in a form that simply towers up from a broad
foundation, in the strong harmony, still almost Umbrian, of the black doublet
and red sleeve, passing on to the sonorous brown of the complexion and hair
beneath the black cap; a silvery, cloudy sky, above the haze of a landscape
recalling the Three Graces at Chantilly, throws up the silhouette into signi-
ficance when seen from a distance. In all this, many a problem was presented
for solution by his technique, which Florence had unsettled and not yet eman-
cipated; energy of modelling is obtained in the brown flesh-tones by means of
grey dashes. As if with a musical beat, the coatings of pigment on the cheeks,
upper lip, 'nose and brows, and the obliquely-laid lights on the fingers, fall
rhythmically, almost like rain.
Even in the pendant, it is already a new painter that seems to be presented to us;
is this due to the greater delicacy of a female subject? It is surely permissible
rather to recognise development in the course of the same commission, in the
fact that here everything, from the rhythm of the composition to the tone of the
colour, seems richer and more complex, absolutely hurrying over the tediousness
of the theme, a quality however which he did not altogether fail to enjoy. For with
almost cruel delight, he expresses here in the distinguished contours of his proto-
type, the Mona Lisa, the early-acquired comfortable manner of living of the patri-
cian lady; everywhere a dance of shapes as in Roger van der Weyden and Schon-
gauer—-even the little tree is there, giving like a delicate tracery the curves, or
at least their direction, into which the empty space is to be divided as a frame
for the figure. It is a play of pattern—mere ovals widening downwards, the face,
in which the parallel forms of nose and chin are brought into prominence with
almost refined humour, the cord round the base of the neck, the large pearl,
the edge of the bodice, the interpenetrating lines of shoulders and arms, lastly
also the patch of light formed by the hands. The shape of a pear has in outline
mere size, but when it is resting on its centre of gravity, it is possessed of a
certain immobility; and this is the form to which, in Raphael’s eyes, the char-
acter of Maddalena Strozzi reduced itself: she cannot have appeared to him so
lively in temperament as her relatives Marietta to Desiderio or Clarice to Titian.
57
§ Angelo and Maddalena Doni
The portraits of Angelo and Maddalena Doni (Plates 46, 47) call us from
the sphere of Court, Church and scholarship into the bourgeois class for which
the young artist had now to work almost exclusively, during his years in Florence.
It is a sign of the ripening maturity of the man of the world that he attained
mastery over so wide a compass, and was capable of characterising with
equal assurance the resolute stolidity of the citizen in the husband or the phleg-
matic self-satisfaction of the wife. Nor is the future monumental painter for
one moment disconcerted by such an incursion into an unfamiliar genre. He
springs upon each model at the outset, as it were, with the only formula that is
appropriate; the sound, forthright, even stately power of this Florentine citizen
Doni reveals itself to the painter in a form that simply towers up from a broad
foundation, in the strong harmony, still almost Umbrian, of the black doublet
and red sleeve, passing on to the sonorous brown of the complexion and hair
beneath the black cap; a silvery, cloudy sky, above the haze of a landscape
recalling the Three Graces at Chantilly, throws up the silhouette into signi-
ficance when seen from a distance. In all this, many a problem was presented
for solution by his technique, which Florence had unsettled and not yet eman-
cipated; energy of modelling is obtained in the brown flesh-tones by means of
grey dashes. As if with a musical beat, the coatings of pigment on the cheeks,
upper lip, 'nose and brows, and the obliquely-laid lights on the fingers, fall
rhythmically, almost like rain.
Even in the pendant, it is already a new painter that seems to be presented to us;
is this due to the greater delicacy of a female subject? It is surely permissible
rather to recognise development in the course of the same commission, in the
fact that here everything, from the rhythm of the composition to the tone of the
colour, seems richer and more complex, absolutely hurrying over the tediousness
of the theme, a quality however which he did not altogether fail to enjoy. For with
almost cruel delight, he expresses here in the distinguished contours of his proto-
type, the Mona Lisa, the early-acquired comfortable manner of living of the patri-
cian lady; everywhere a dance of shapes as in Roger van der Weyden and Schon-
gauer—-even the little tree is there, giving like a delicate tracery the curves, or
at least their direction, into which the empty space is to be divided as a frame
for the figure. It is a play of pattern—mere ovals widening downwards, the face,
in which the parallel forms of nose and chin are brought into prominence with
almost refined humour, the cord round the base of the neck, the large pearl,
the edge of the bodice, the interpenetrating lines of shoulders and arms, lastly
also the patch of light formed by the hands. The shape of a pear has in outline
mere size, but when it is resting on its centre of gravity, it is possessed of a
certain immobility; and this is the form to which, in Raphael’s eyes, the char-
acter of Maddalena Strozzi reduced itself: she cannot have appeared to him so
lively in temperament as her relatives Marietta to Desiderio or Clarice to Titian.
57