Madonna del Carmine

After the rhythmic, pictorial and illusionistic interpretations that painters and sculptors would give throughout the century of Donatello's highly individual schiacciato in the Madonna di Casa Pazzi, only the young Michelangelo would grasp its full significance. Already in the reliefs of Agostino di Duccio, the pathetic and energetic schiacciato of Donatello and the delicately and nervously sensitive one of Desiderio are transformed into a weave of counterpoints between layers of planes cut in the light and arabesques of abstract linear flourishes. An intellectualistic culture, which recovers within humanist taste the aristocratic tradition of cosmopolitan and courtly Gothic, using the neo-Attic and Byzantine repertoire, crystallizes the free vital flow of Renaissance relief.