Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Giovanni Francesco da Rimini
Italian; 15th-century
Ljubljana, Slovenia: National Gallery of Slovenia
85%
Madonna with Christ Child Blessing (The Hoče Madonna). c1465 and 17th century. Tempera on wood with custom frame (with Unknown Artists (Italian))
This painting, known as the Hoče Madonna because for many years it lived in a castle in that town, was painted in the 15th century but, at some point in the 16th, was sawn down and placed in its current frame, which is lined with small slots that contain not only additional tiny paintings and some jewelry, but also bone fragments labeled with the names of saints. Francesco's painting itself is unremarkable: quattrocento painting like this, when it's good, is good to the extent that in it can be sensed some sort of collision taking place between fading medieval and nascent modern picture-making sensibilities. But neither are Francesco's figures exquisitely stilted and reduced (as they might have been in older art), nor do they appear to be creaking into vibrant reality against their limiting gold ground (as the figures do, at their best, in the early years of the Renaissance). But damn! That frame! Forget Francesco: inside all those crypt-like receptacles surrounding his Mary are so many riddles about what painting is, what it does, as art. Painting is deathliness transmuted into life, it's time's inevitability turned in on itself, it's presence subsuming absence, it's an eternal present glinting in spite of all the mementos of its impossibility. It's bones beside an image of grace. (TFS, 2025)