Pre-Baroque Italian paintings

That’s my name for a number of 16th-century canvases at the Metropolitan characterized by large size and spaciousness of composition:

Francesco Granacci, Scenes from the Life of St. John the Baptist, ca. 1510, about 4½ feet wide.



Bugiardini, Adam and Eve, turn of 16th century, double-frame about 7½ feet wide.



Granacci’s workshop, John the Baptist preaching, a good five feet wide, about 1520



All three use size to gain spaciousness. In the Preaching, the saint’s auditors arrange themselves casually on various rock features, sitting or leaning ad lib, except for the two Pharisees, who stand at the far left, one of them pointing to the approaching Christ. The auditors form not a circle, as one would naturally expect, but a broken line. They are grouped 3-1-John-1-4-2, and each group has lots of space between, above, and behind them. In the background one sees a nicely executed landscape – a woods, then a lake then high mountains. Why is the Pharisee the one who first spots Christ’s approach? Christ is on a path that will lead him behind the Pharisees, then around their right, then face to face with the Baptist – all with plenty of room.

The Granacci is similar. We see three arches of a sort of porch of a structure that is not entirely in the frame. Each arch has a scene from John’s life: the Visitation, the boy’s birth (with the BVM in attendance), and a scene of Elizabeth and Zechariah sitting at a fireplace with a veil of some sort. From the interior of the building, female attendants enter the visible area by two different doors. Left of the house is a rendition of the scene with Zechariah in the tabernacle, where the tabernacle is portrayed as unattached to any other building and entirely open to the air!

Here are comments from the Met

On the Adam and Eve--

Towards the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century Bugiardini painted a number of oblong paintings on canvas with male and female nudes in a landscape. These may have been intended to hang in a bedroom framed in a wainscoting. This pair is unusual in illustrating a Biblical rather than a classical theme: the temptation of Eve. The landscape and figure types, with their angular contours, recall Northern paintings and prints, which Bugiardini must have studied closely. The picture was long ascribed to Piero di Cosimo.
Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini (Italian, Florentine, 1475–1554)
Oil on canvas; Each 26 3/8 x 61 3/4 in. (67 x 156.8 cm)
Bequest of Edward Fowles, 1971 (1971.115.3ab)

On the Life of Baptist
Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1510
Francesco Granacci (Francesco di Andrea di Marco) (Italian, Florentine, 1469–1543)
Oil, tempera, and gold on wood; 31 1/2 x 60 in. (80 x 152.4 cm)
Purchase, Gwynne Andrews, Harris Brisbane Dick, Dodge, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds, funds from various donors, Ella Morris de Peyster Gift, Mrs. Donald Oenslager Gift, and Gifts in memory of Robert Lehman, 1970 (1970.134.1)
Left to right are shown: the Annunciation to Zacharias, the future father of John the Baptist; Elizabeth's visit with Mary (the Visitation); the Birth of John the Baptist, with Zacharias warming himself at a fireplace. The panel, which is cut at the right, was completed by a fourth scene showing the infant John taken to his father (Cleveland Museum of Art). The architecture is decorated with allegorical motifs apparently derived from Roman coins. Granacci would have become familiar with such classical details in the studio of his teacher, Domenico Ghirlandaio, where he worked alongside the young Michelangelo. This engaging picture belongs to a series of three panels recounting the life of John the Baptist (the second is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the third is displayed nearby). They were doubtless painted to decorate a chapel or oratory and date from about 1510.

On the Baptist Preaching
The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1510
Workshop of Francesco Granacci (Italian, Florentine, 1469–1543)
Oil, tempera, and gold on wood; 29 3/4 x 82 1/2 in. (75.6 x 209.6 cm)
Purchase, Gwynne Andrews, Harris Brisbane Dick, Dodge, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds, funds from various donors, Ella Morris de Peyster Gift, Mrs. Donald Oenslager Gift, and Gifts in memory of Robert Lehman, 1970 (1970.134.2)
This panel concluded the series to which the adjacent picture belonged. It shows Saint John the Baptist preaching. The two Pharisees at the left gesture towards the advancing figure of Christ. A work of great distinction, the picture is in many respects superior to the companion panel and must be by another artist. Collaborations of this sort were common in the Renaissance. A tentative attribution has been made to Raffaello Botticini, whose later works, however, never attain this quality. The affinities some of the figures show with the Doni Tondo of Michelangelo further point up the stature of the piece. Michelangelo and Granacci were friends and fellow pupils in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio.