Madonna and Child Enthroned with Music-Making Angels

1455 · Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia

religious

This painting is called the Madonna of the Orchestra. Ideas that are at once similar to yet different from the Madonna del Pergolato emerge in this smaller altarpiece, which was painted in Perugia about a decade later. The expressive di sotto in s perspective lends a sort of monumentality to the blond, music-making angels playing a variety of instruments - including a lute, tambourine, cymbals, rebec, reed pipe and harp - as they stand on a high, semicircular podium around the Virgin's throne; together with two additional angels in the foreground playing a portable organ and a zither, they give the painting its traditional name: the Madonna of the Orchestra.

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Madonna and Child Enthroned with Music-Making Angels

About the Artist

Giovanni di Piermatteo Boccati

1420 – 1487

Giovanni di Piermatteo Boccati (also Boccato or Giovanni di Piermatteo Boccati da Camerino) was an Italian painter, active in Umbria. He obtained citizenship in Perugia in 1445. Initially he was influenced by the Florentine masters Lippi, Fra Angelico and Uccello, amongst others, later by the Sienese, in particular Domenico di Bartolo. Together with his compatriot and sometime companion Giovanni Angelo d'Antonio, he was the chief representative of painting under the Da Varanno rulers of Camerino. However, unlike Giovanni Angelo, Boccati enjoyed a success that extended over a much broader area. He was active in Perugia (1445-47; about 1454-60; 1479), Padua (1448), and Orvieto (1473), and was employed by Federigo da Montefeltro to fresco a room in a wing of his palace at Urbino, prior to 1467. In this respect, his cultural background can be considered cosmopolitan, although he never had more than a superficial understanding of the basis of Renaissance art: his mastery of perspective was primitive at best and his figures show no interest in anatomy.

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