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Sacra Conversazione
What Is It?
sacra conversazione (Ital. holy conversation) is the name given to a representation
of the Madonna and Child with Saints, in which the sacred personages are
meditating, or reading, or aware of each other, or are united by some common
action. This type of representation replaced the earlier form of altarpiece in
which each figure occupied one panel of a polyptych: in a sacra conversazione
the barriers have been broken down and all the figures have moved into a
single, unified space. The earliest examples occur in the work of Fra Angelico
and his contemporaries, Fra Filippo Lippi and Domenico Veneziano, but it
has been suggested that the dismembered Pisa Polypych by Masaccio may
have been the first. Donatello's altar in the Santo at Padua seems to have
introduced the idea, in three-dimensional form, to the North, and Mantegna's
S. Zeno altarpiece (1459) forms the link between the Florentine examples and
the important altarpieces, all of c.1475, by Piero della Francesca, Antonello
and Giovanni Bellini, which create a single, unified space for the figures and
for the spectator by making the architecture in which the figures are placed an
extension of the achitecture of the chapel itself.
Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (Penguin Reference Books)
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