A masterpiece of sweetness and minuteness: Pinturicchio's Madonna of Peace

Guido Piovene, perhaps the greatest of Italian travel writers, described the Madonna of Peace as “the best picture painted by Pinturicchio.” The choice is a tough one: Bernardino di Betto was a sublime artist; it is difficult to say which of the creations that came out of his divine hand surpasses the others. If, therefore, one can discuss at length Piovene’s judgment, in his 1957 Viaggio in Italia , of the work preserved in the Pinacoteca di San Severino Marche, one can nevertheless welcome the description he gives of it: for Piovene, the Madonna della Pace is a masterpiece that is “very sweet, minute, almost illuminated, it seems to summarize in itself the average spirit of the Marche and Umbria.” Sweetness and minuteness were two distinctive elements of late 15th-century Umbrian painting, and Pinturicchio knew how to take them to the highest degree: in the Madonna of Peace he gives a clear demonstration of this.

There is sweetness in the fine features of the celestial characters, especially in that adolescent Madonna, an idealized beauty holding a very blond Child with regal bearing, caught in the act of blessing the commissioner, Liberato Bartelli, formerly apostolic protonotary, canon of Santa Maria in Trastevere and of St. Peter’s and the pope’s valet secretary, who requested the panel from the Perugian painter to make a gift to the cathedral of San Severino Marche: the Marche patrician, who had just been appointed prior of the cathedral, evidently wanted to celebrate his new title in this way, and in all likelihood turned to Pinturicchio after being introduced to him by Niccolò Bufalini, his friend, for whom the artist had worked on one of his best-known undertakings, the decoration of the Bufalini Chapel in Santa Maria in Aracoeli. There is sweetness in the angels assisting at the scene, one with joined hands looking into the eyes of the observer and the other bowing his face, in that attitude that we find in the same years also in Leonardo da Vinci: the sources from which the two artists drank were not so distant, since by transverse ways the lesson of the great Florentines also reached Pinturicchio. There is sweetness in the profile of the hills that stand out in the background, with a village overlooking the banks of the river: these are those of the lands where the painter lived and worked. And what about the sunlit lanes through the hills and surrounding countryside, complete with passing knights? Looking at a Pinturicchio painting also means getting lost in the details, lingering over the seemingly superfluous, admiring and marveling at a flower, at an embroidery, at a turret in the distance, at the golden glow that brings out the sunlit part of a tree’s foliage, at the openwork texture of a halo. All the more so because this master of the Umbrian Renaissance did not master aerial perspective as others would do after him: for Pinturicchio, a detail in the distance is almost as sharp as an object that is inches away from the relative.

Pinturicchio, Madonna of Peace (c. 1488-1490; tempera on panel, 94 x 64 cm; San Severino Marche, Pinacoteca Comunale Tacchi Venturi)

Because Pinturicchio was also a master of descriptive analysis. The Madonna of Peace is also a masterpiece of Flemish minutiae: it is so, first of all, for the way he treats the very outline of the hills, sharp, acting as a backdrop along with the craggy rocks, mindful of certain Ferrara painting, and the slender saplings that regularly punctuate the composition vertically, offering the eye balance and equilibrium. There is minuteness in the nimbuses of the Madonna and the angels, which are transparent: beyond the play of decorations one glimpses the foliage of the plants. There is minuteness in the gems adorning the robes of the beautiful angels, in the satin pillow, in the clothing of the Child, who is not naked as in the paintings of the Tuscan Renaissance painters: he is dressed in full regalia like the Children the painter saw in the mosaics of Santa Maria in Trastevere or Santa Maria Nova or other ancient Roman churches, and here he wears an ancient Roman’s pallium, celestial and woven with gold, placed over a dalmatic with golden borders. There is minuteness in the crucigerous globe he holds in his right hand, a symbol of his supremacy over the world: for a great expert on Pinturicchio, Franco Ivan Nucciarelli, that crystal ball is one of the most Pinturicchio-esque elements of the whole, a “happy descriptive moment,” on a par with the “trees of paradoxical height carried to the upper limit of the painting.” It is “almost a jewel,” Nucciarelli writes, “destined to consolidate itself within Pinturicchio’s lexicon” and consequently to resurface in other moments of his production.

Pinturicchio’s is thus, first and foremost, the painting of the delicacy of forms, profiles and complexions, the richness of detail, formal elegance and refined execution: the globe really seems to become a sphere of the most fragile crystal, the reverberations of the golden iridescence of the robes really restore the tactile evidence of a precious fabric, the faint light that spreads evenly is really that of a spring morning in Umbria, the kneeling patron is really a man captured naturalistically in the full presence of his physicality, complete with a vein pulsing on his temple and cheeks furrowed with wrinkles. But to this softness and minutiae Pinturicchio, a solid artist nonetheless, combines consistency of volume and monumental steadfastness that harkens back to his interests in Florentine painting. It is as if the Madonna of Peace celebrates the meeting of different Renaissance periods: Umbria, Flanders and Tuscany coexist harmoniously in Pinturicchio’s masterpiece.

Corrado Ricci listed the Madonna of Peace, “giovine, bella, soave, col col collo tutto scoperto, nella veste rosa, dal mantle d’oltremare oscurato,” among Pinturicchio’s best works, but he also took the opportunity to make a criticism of the artist: “If Pintoricchio had painted like this for a long time,” we read in his 1915 monograph, “if the accumulation of works, in ispecie of decoration, had not rendered him later neglected and sometimes even coarse [...]; if, in short, theart of his, having reached this peak, had succeeded, if not in ascending another even more sublime one, at least in remaining in it for a long time, no Umbrian painter and few among the Italians of the time would certainly have deserved the praise of greater grace, finesse and venustance.” And of the same opinion was Berenson, according to whom the last Pinturicchio (the one in the Piccolomini Library, to be clear), was an “all tinsel and costume painting” artist. However one wants to think about the extreme outcomes of Pinturicchio’s art, it is difficult to find fault with the Madonna of Peace, appreciated by virtually all critics of every era. Also because it was a work destined to remain imprinted in the memory for a long time: not only in that of Pinturicchio, who returned several times to this painting to produce other masterpieces that clearly derive from the masterpiece executed for the Cathedral of Sanseverino. These are, essentially, Madonnas preserved in museums all over the world: perhaps the best known connection is with the so-called “Bambin Gesù delle mani” in the Giordano Foundation in Perugia, linked to a fragmentary face of the Virgin now kept in a private collection. But also in the memory of other artists, from Macrino d’Alba to Marco Palmezzano, for example. The recent exhibition Raphael and Friends of Urbino has also placed the San Severino Marche panel in relation to Raphael’s beginnings: not to establish precise parallels, but rather, Luca Pezzuto has written, to “evoke the established but complex relationship between Pinturicchio and Raphael.” The relationship with Pinturicchio, the scholar recalls, “had a significant impact on the development of the young Raphael, who took technical and iconographic aspects from his older colleague.” On the road to the great Renaissance, therefore, is also San Severino’s Madonna of Peace .

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