Giorgione and Cima da Conegliano

In the Tempest Giorgione raised the iconography of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt to a new level. He took the Madonna off of her interior throne and placed her outside on the ground nursing her infant Son. Both her pose and the setting are very naturalistic.

Giorgione’s depiction of a nude Madonna was unprecendented but his placement of her in a landscape can find an antecedent in the work of Cima da Conegliano. At least two works by Cima can be considered as versions of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Each portray a Madonna in a landscape with St. Joseph and other figures. In the first, the Madonna dell' Arancia, Joseph is barely visible in the background with the Ass. In the second, now in the Calouste Gulbenkian collection, Joseph has a much more prominent role. In both cases the Madonna sits on a rocky earthern throne that could well be Cima's way of depicting the remains of the Egyptian idols and temples that crumbled after the arrival of the infant Jesus into Egypt. In his study of Correggio, David Ekserdjian noted the innovative character of Cima's work.

Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano
Madonna dell' Arancio
Accademia, Venice

The North Italian who comes nearest to the concept of the sacra conversazione in a pure landscape is Cima da Conegliano… the two monumental examples in his work are not straight forward Madonnas with Saints, but rather Rests on the Flight into Egypt. The earliest is probably Cima’s famous Madonna dell’Arancio. It is evidently an altarpiece, and the earliest reference to it records its presence in the church of the Franciscan convent of Santa Chiara on Murano, presumably its original location,…It departs radically from what was by this time the accepted way of showing the Virgin and Saints in Venice, to which Cima normally adhered. …this innovation is linked with the fact that the painting is strictly speaking a Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Although he is generally ignored, the figure of Joseph with the ass is included in the background, and alerts us to the fact. The rejection of the usual architectural surround for the saints is a notable step forward, and the Virgin’s throne has become a rocky knoll with the tree behind her providing a strong vertical accent.*

Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano
Sacra Conversazione (Rest on the Flight into Egypt)
ca. 1500

Rona Goffen described a later "Rest" by Cima in her study of the Calouste Gulbenkian collection. She noticed that Cima again used the rocky throne for the Madonna, and that Joseph now has been brought prominently into the foreground. Also, note that the two angels standing on either side of the Madonna are often portrayed in versions of the Rest as guides and providers.

Cima’s Sacra Conversazione is set in an expansive mountain landscape, evoking his native city of Conegliano (on the mainland near Venice), suffused with light and air, and permeated with a sense of the harmonious existence of man in nature. The Madonna is enthroned, so to speak, on a platform of rocks. Above her, a tree punctuates her central position and suggests the canopy of an earthly monarch’s throne. Thus Cima represents at once two apparently contradictory themes: the Virgin enthroned as Queen of Heaven and also as the Madonna of Humility, seated upon the rocky ground. Graciously, and yet with an air of abstraction, Mary inclines her head to her right, toward St. John the Baptist with his cross. The saint closes the composition at the left by turning inward and pointing toward Christ, that is, identifying Him as the Lamb of God. Meanwhile, the Infant bends in the opposite direction, toward his left and St. Lucy, identified by her martyr’s palm (in her left hand) and by her burning lamp.

Cima’s famous altarpiece, the Madonna dell’Arancio (Venice, Accademia), dating from the mid- 1490s, is the prototype of his Madonna in the Gulbenkian collection. There are several significant changes, however. The vertical emphasis of the altarpiece is replaced in the Gulbenkian panel by the horizontal format favored by Venetian artists in the early sixteenth century, and suggests a date of around 1500. Moreover, in translating his compositional ideas from a large altarpiece to a small image for private devotion, Cima appropriately represented a more intimate scene of the Holy Family, in which Joseph appears with Mary and the Child, rather than in the background. Such a representation of the complete group very likely appealed to the personal piety of the private household for which Cima would have painted this image. **

I question the contradiction that Goffen pointed out between a Queen of Heaven and a Madonna of Humility. I don't believe that a Renaissance artist ever set out to portray a Madonna of Humility. This phrase is a later invention that was employed to describe a Madonna sitting outdoors in a landscape. It would be better if every so-called Madonna of Humility were understood as some episode from the flight into Egypt.

*David Ekserdjian, Correggio, Yale, 1997. p.200.

**Rona Goffen, Museums Discovered: The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, 1982. p. 60.

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