As demonstrated by the cases of Duccio and Simone, Italian stained glass was often integrated into the surrounding decorative program, dismantling the boundaries between media. Nowhere is this more fully realized than in Taddeo Gaddi’s Bar-oncelli Chapel in Santa Croce of Florence (Figure 2.6). The BarBar-oncelli family commissioned this burial chapel in honor of the Virgin Mary, and the decoration throughout aptly celebrates her. The frescoes on the walls depict various aspects of her life, while the painted altarpiece commemorates her Coronation, and the sculptures positioned at the entry portal reenact the Annunciation. As in the case of Duccio’s stained glass window, Taddeo’s window also shows suggestions of per-spective and pictorial devices as well as a desire to extend its agency beyond the frame to interact with the surrounding environment.
Diana Norman and Paul Hills have described the many ways in which Taddeo’s chapel carefully incorporated the stained glass window and its lighting into a cohesive program about the mystery of divine revelation.40 As with the case of Saint Martin’s chapel, lighting from the window has been used in both descrip-tive ways and symbolic ones throughout the frescoes. The scenes to the left of the window—which show the Annunciation to Mary on the top register, the Annunciation to the shepherds in the middle, and the Annunciation to the Magi on the lowest register—feature a visionary moment where an angelic visitor seems to almost emerge from the window to deliver a divine message. As already mentioned, Simone Martini employed a similar strategy in the chapel of Saint Martin, and even closer in time and space, Taddeo’s master Giotto used the ambi-ent light as inspiration for his frescoes in the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels, which were located just across the transept from Taddeo’s own chapel.41 However, unlike in Giotto’s chapel, Taddeo used the windows’ light to illuminate and describe the illusionistic scene, and he also used the same light as a symbolic metaphor for the presence of the divine.42
Attesting to Taddeo’s interest in unusual lighting effects is the fact that his frescoes—particularly his Annunciation to the Shepherds—are some of the earli-est Renaissance paintings to depict dramatic night scenes and sensitivity to the shadows produced by bright light falling on objects such as the strap of the shep-herd’s canteen. Furthermore, the contour lines found throughout this depiction are somewhat blurred and the colors are muted, visual effects which are consis-tent with a night scene lit by a sharp, bright light source. This comparison is an interesting one because some scholars have asserted that Taddeo may have in fact observed such a scenario during the solar eclipse of 1339.43
Figure 2.6: Taddeo Gaddi, Baroncelli Chapel, ca. 1330, Santa Croce, Florence. Source:
Francesco Bini via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-2.5).
Another aspect of Taddeo’s chapel that attests to this artist’s more in-depth interest in optics and light is the depictions of glass in the chapel’s original altar-piece. In the now-detached pinnacle currently in the San Diego Museum of Art (Figure 2.7), God is depicted as an older, bearded, man surrounded by six angels.
Four of the angelic beings shield their eyes from the divine glory of God, while two others hold circular objects that appear to be made of glass as if to reflect or somehow refract a direct view of God. Whether the circular objects are clear glass or reflective glass, this scene closely resonates with an illustration of the Beatific Vision as described by Saint Paul, where one can only view God “through a glass, darkly.”44 The angels experience the difficulty of viewing God’s powerful illumination just as an artist would have experienced pain while trying to study the lighting of the sun.45
Figure 2.7: Giotto and Workshop, Pinnacle for the Baroncelli Altarpiece, ca. 1334, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, Gift of Anne R. and Amy Putnam (1945.26). Source:
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Although the Baroncelli altarpiece has traditionally been attributed to Giotto, many scholars have noted the master was in high demand at this time, and the execution would have largely been carried out by his workshop. Taddeo Gaddi was taking his own commissions but he was still very involved with Giotto’s shop, and therefore it is not hard to imagine that Taddeo played a large role in the altar-piece as well.46 When this possibility is taken into consideration, the depictions in altarpiece pinnacle take on greater import and evince a larger network of glass.
Another way in which Taddeo’s chapel engaged with the glass network was through the depiction of transparent glass in one of the illusionistic niches at the base of the wall. In the second niche, to the viewer’s left upon entering the chapel, the fictive cupboards contain a liturgical vessel for wine made of transparent glass (Figure 2.8). By making the wine—the blood of Christ—directly visible through the clear glass, the artist allowed the viewer an opportunity to see the wine, which would soon be transformed into the blood of Christ, and meditate on the mirac-ulous transubstantiation. Like the divine revelations occurring in the paintings on the walls above the fictive cupboards, the clear glass carafe offered the viewer a chance to come close to experiencing a physical presence of the divine. More will be said about how transparent glass facilitated relic worship in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. But here it is important to note that there were many transparent glass and crystal reliquaries with which Taddeo could have been familiar.