Reply #97: Here is one "official" criticism. But see also Michael Levey and R.W.B Lewis [View All]

[CTyankee]

who beg to differ on the merits of this work!

Orcagna’s Tabernacle in the Orsanmichele in Florence.

Most scholars view this unusual altarpiece as a conscious effort to return to pre-Giottesque conceptions of religious art. Orcagna rejected the logical and coherent spatial articulation of Giotto and his followers to return to the tense, cramped abstract space of earlier days. He filled the gold openings of the frame with insistently plastic and full forms, often using contradictory, devices. The figure of Christ, for example, is brought forward to the foreground plane by his gestures to St. Thomas and St. Peter and simultaneously pushed back in space by the way the adoring angels overlap the seraphim of his mandorla.

The explanation for Orcagna's return to an earlier artistic conception is probably the shattering effect of the plague, or Black Death, of 1348. The survivors of the epidemic interpreted it as evidence of God's anger and vengeance against the moral corruption of mankind. Their efforts to appease Him took the form of returning to the sanctified ways of their ancestors. Artists, too, rejected the realism of their immediate predecessors, Giotto and his school, for the abstraction of late-13th-century art. Orcagna's Strozzi Altarpieces the finest work of the period illustrating this attitude.

In other words, the style of the day had passed him by. Giotto had eclipsed Orcagna's school of art. And it didn't help that the Early Renaissance was coming quickly by 1400 (Orcagna's work was in the 1300s). So Orcagna was somewhat ignored by the art critics and put down as not being "with it." But some art historians are showing a renewed interest in what is called the "Italian Gothic" which this is an example of...