Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance in Florence (review)
New Testament, and Lex Timoris, or Law of Fear, or the Old Testament. New Testament scenes are accompanied by inscriptions below each from the Gospel source; above each New Testament scene is the Old Testament type or prefiguration; for the Nativity, for example, is a vignette of Moses and the Burning Bush, accompanied both above and below by Old Testament verses, that below from the passage in Exodus illustrated, and above from Isaiah, “Unto us a child is born” (9:6). The close correspondence of the subject, format, and inscriptions between the manuscript scenes and the scenes for the silver chest — as well as the occasional deviation — is carefully noted by Gilbert and leads this reader to agree with Gilbert’s conclusion that this manuscript — or one dependent on it — was Angelico’s iconographic source. In the second major part of the book Gilbert reconsiders the original format of the silver chest panels. He proposes that there were originally four panels and that they were separated into eight panels almost immediately in 1453 (see his figure A) when the original scheme, in which the doors opened outwards, proved unworkable in the limited space; only in 1461–63 were the doors converted into a large shutter that was raised and lowered with ropes. His proposed reconstruction (see figure B) also contends that the thirty-five extant scenes represent the survival of the entire production by Angelico and that the six episodes from the life of Christ that are missing from the narrative (and included in the Venetian manuscript), presumed by other scholars to be lost, represent a reduction of the program itself at the time of the reinstallation and the execution of the three scenes by Baldovinetti. Gilbert’s argument here, while unprovable, is a not unreasonable account of the puzzling iconographic and physical evidence presented by the now dismembered panels, and it is worth considering alongside the reconstructions proposed by Casalini and others. The Lex Amoris is, then, another confirmation of what has become increasingly clear in the most recent scholarship, that the “angelic” painter was not only an artist of incomparable invention, but also a thinker who gave visual form to theological truths. JEAN K. CADOGAN Trinity College, Hartford