BOCCATI, Giovanni di Piermatteo
(b. ca. 1420, Camerino, d. 1487)

Madonna and Child Enthroned with Music-Making Angels

c. 1455
Tempera on wood, 131 x 96 cm
Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia

This painting is called the Madonna of the Orchestra. Ideas that are at once similar to yet different from the Madonna del Pergolato emerge in this smaller altarpiece, which was painted in Perugia about a decade later. The expressive di sotto in sù perspective lends a sort of monumentality to the blond, music-making angels playing a variety of instruments - including a lute, tambourine, cymbals, rebec, reed pipe and harp - as they stand on a high, semicircular podium around the Virgin's throne; together with two additional angels in the foreground playing a portable organ and a zither, they give the painting its traditional name: the Madonna of the Orchestra. What is striking here with respect to the Pergolato Altarpiece is the new, systematic insistence on a marble revetment, although the effect is tempered by the meadow in the foreground emphasized by the two little angels who kneel to pick flowers.




© Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx.