This essay originally appeared in 2012.
If the artwork above looks familiar, the reason might be that it was part of the argument that Ann made in a recent post. She suggested that the beauty of the Florentine paintings of the fifteenth century—“stunning, literally; you look at them and can hardly breathe”—couldn’t have been due only to the usual reasons that art history texts cite: Florence’s return to a leading role in international commerce combined with the rise of humanism and rationality. The intensity of the beauty, Ann argued in both words and images, must be due to the intensity of the catastrophes that recently had befallen Florence: the flood of 1333, the financial collapse of 1346, the drought of 1346 and 1347, and finally, in 1348, the Black Death.
No argument here. Or, I should say, no argument with Ann. But the final work of art in her argument, Sandro Botticelli’s 1489 Annunciation, prompted me to think about not only where fifteenth-century Florentine art came from but where it would lead. More precisely, what got me to thinking was the window in the painting.