Baldovinetti was at one time in close contact with Uccello, and of all his works the “Madonna and Child” in the Jacquemart-André collection is the most heroically uncompromising (Plate IX). No doubt he accepted more material directly from nature than Uccello did. He was beginning to explore the principles of atmospheric perspective which were destined ultimately to break up the unity of pictorial design, but everything that he takes is used with the same spirit of obedience to the laws of architectonic harmony. The spacing of this design, the relations of volume of the upright mass of the Virgin’s figure to the spaces of sky and landscape have the unmistakable interdependence of great design. Only a great creative artist could have discovered so definite a relationship. The great mass of the rocky hill in the landscape and the horizontal lines of the Child’s figure play into the central idea with splendid effect. Only in the somewhat rounded and insensitive modelling of the Virgin’s face does the weakness of Baldovinetti’s genius betray itself. The contours are everywhere magnificently plastic; only when he tries to create the illusion of plastic relief by modelling, Baldovinetti becomes literal and uninspired. In his profile portrait in the National Gallery he relies fortunately almost entirely on the plasticity of the contour--in his late “Trinità” at the Accademia in Florence the increasing desire for imitative realism has already gone far to destroy this quality.
The third picture (see Plate) which I have taken as illustrating my theme is not, it is true, Florentine, but its author, Signorelli, kept so constantly in touch with the scientific realists of Florence that he may be counted almost as one of them, nor indeed did any of them surpass him in uncompromising fidelity to the necessities of pure design. Certainly there is nothing of the flattering or seductive qualities of the common run of Umbrian art in this robust and audacious composition, in which everything is arranged as it were concentrically around the imposing mass of the Virgin’s figure. The gestures interpreted psychologically are not on the same imaginative plane as the design itself. Signorelli was ill at ease in interpreting any states but those of great tension, and here the gestures are meant to be playful and intimate. As in the Uccello, the illustrative pretext is at variance with the design which it serves; and as in the Uccello, the design itself, the scaffolding of the architectonic structure, is really what counts.