Portinari altarpiece is a triptych portraying the Adoration of Shepards, commissioned for Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The symbolism and attention to detail that created numerous layers of this altarpiece made it stand out to me. In one of the rare cases we have Christ almost defenseless in the center of the painting in the central panel. He is laid down on a sheaf of wheat, which is literally the meaning of the word Bethlehem, the town where Jesus was born.The cow and a donkey used in the first panel are brought in the central one as well, not only to continue the story, but so the viewer through the contrast in their behavior (one is eating the second is looking up) shows the difference between Christians and Jewish people, who failed to recognize the importance of the moment and Christ as Son of God. The piece uses so much detail and symbolism that even the flowers and vases in the bottom of the central panel have a deeper meaning. Blue iris represents royalty, white iris purity of Virgin Mary and red lilies the passion of Christ (foreshadowing). Even the vase is decorated with grapes representing the blood of Christ. The glass containing flowers is transparent, promoting Churches’ theory that if light can go through a glass and not shatter it, so can Virgin Mary give birth ti Christ and remain a virgin. Finally, almost an invisible detail was added by Hugo. Behind a colon and above the cow, devil is painted lurking in the darkness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is interesting to see that priests are not in the painting itself, either suggesting that the priest should be standing in front of it, including the piece into the mass itself or that baby Jesus represents a priest. I find it extremely impressive that artists being limited with the technology of those times, managed to add details that were invisible to human eye until modern days. They also had such knowledge of composition as well as religion to seemingly with such ease incorporate so many different symbols and meanings while all of them working together to form a complete painting, whose meaning, just as a painting itself, is composed out of all of these parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Portinari altarpiece is a triptych portraying the Adoration of Shepards, commissioned for Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The symbolism and attention to detail that created numerous layers of this altarpiece made it stand out to me. In one of the rare cases we have Christ almost defenseless in the center of the painting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7923,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7923"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1338,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions\/1338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}