Niccolo’ di Pietro Gerini (14th century) – Madonna with child

BORGO SAN LORENZO (Pieve di San Lorenzo) – Placed significantly on the same pillar as the Madonna of Giotto, this centrally-shaped table, represents again the central panel of a dismembered polyptych, of which the side facades have been identified and kept in foreign museums (actually, only one is preserved, while the other three went lost during 1913). The piece depicts the Madonna and the Child, in the same attitude as seen in the table of Giotto but in this case with a different outcome: the figure of the Virgin, with her sweet face and the almost grateful smile, very different from the melancholy severity, knowing the fate of the Son clearly noticeable in the Giottesque face. The clear spatial features recall Giotto’s style once more, the deep undercut of the folds of the mantle in the Madonna of Giotto has been here transformed into a slender figure, with no weight and volume, all constituted by elegance and linear rhythms. The gestures of the Child, a figure so monumental in size as much as light and flat, have lost much of the sincere affectionate features they had in the Giotto masterpiece to take on the accents of a refined ceremony. In short, even in this case, the author of the table, identified with Niccolò di Pietro Gerini in the years 1375-1380, without forgetting the teaching of Giotto, has now turned in the direction of a more graceful and refined language, more abstract in the definition of the volumes as well as for the choice of colours.

© Il Filo – Idee e Notizie dal Mugello