The Golden Legend and the Renaissance: Shaping the Visual Language of Saints.
Did you ever consider how comes that most Christians can recognize some of the most influential saints of our tradition by looking at simple artworks? This is because by the late 12th and 13th centuries, Italian art was transitioning between a Gothic art that still spoke with a Byzantine language and was exploring in realism, detail, perspective. Some would define this period as the proto-Renaissance, beginning with Cimabue, Cavallini, Giotto and culminating with Lorenzo Monaco and Gentile da Fabriano. It is during this period, while Italian churches are being decorated with frescoes and altarpieces by these great masters, that those recognizable iconographies of the saints emerge as we now know them and at the basis of this is an extremely influential text to Christian iconography. Adoration of the Magi, Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, Tempera on Panel, Uffizi Gallery, Florence. In the late 13th century, Dominican friar Jacopo da Voragine writes the Legenda Aurea a hagiographical collectio...
