Visiting a confortably empty church in Florence to discover a seminal Filippino Lippi

In Florence, not far from the crowded tourist routes, close to the museum Bragello, you enter a place surprisingly rich of unpredictable relationships between form and information.

 

Walking along via dei Magazzini, on the opposite side of Proconsolo street, and not far from the cathedral, is to be found the church of Badia (Santa Maria Assunta della Badia Fiorentina), founded in 978 ac, then completely renovated in 1285 by Arnolfo di Cambio and later radically altered. Here, in 1373, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio made the first public reading of the “Divina commedia” by Dante Alighieri, establishing a tradition of Lecture Dantis that still goes on.

 

On the left wall of the church there is one of the greatest masterpieces of Filippino Lippi (Prato, 1457 – Florence, 1504). It is the Apparition of Our Lady to St. Bernardo (1485 ca.). The unreal character of the composition is the result of both the elongated form of the figures and the scenario of rocks, almost anthropomorphic and ghostly. It also has a rich iconography of literary meanings, a close relationship between form and information. In the painting there is a scroll with the words “substine at abstine”, which is a quote from Epitetto; there is the Gospel of St. Luke, which is open on the page of the Annunciation; there is Bernard portrait in the act of writing homilies; there are monks at the bottom right alluding to the active and contemplative life. The iconographic program of the work thus proposes a rich conceptual path, a sort of puzzle to be solved by crossing the themes of the books shown or mentioned, and the theological significance of the figures represented.

 

Other notable works are in this church, that once contained also a painting by Giotto now in the Uffizi museum. Among them are those of the sculptor Mino da Fiesole, and frescoes attributed to Nardo di Cione.

 

When Conceptual Fine Arts came to this place to take the photos you see in the gallery, a Saturday, in December, a few days before Christmas, at the church of the Badia there were only five people, silently sitting in prayer.

July 17, 2015