Introduction

In the 1450s Florentine artists changed the backgrounds of their altarpieces and devotional paintings from glittering gold leaf (Fig. 1.1) to vivid green pigments (Plate 1). An early example is Fra Filippo Lippi (1406–69) who depicted mystical green forests in several of his Adoration of the Child paintings (Plate 1 & Fig. 1.2), which he completed for the Medici family between the late 1450s and mid-1460s. This same gold-to-green trend can be observed in the art of Lippi's student, Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), who in his Piacenza Tondo (Plate 2) situated a Madonna Adoring the Child with St. John the Baptist in a verdant meadow partially enclosed by a hedge of roses. This artistic shift from heaven's abstract flatness to a tangible green world signals the beginning of naturalism in fifteenth-century Florentine painting. It also marks a shift in the taste of patrons, for whom the artist's skill outweighed the material value of his gold pigment, a point famously argued by Michael Baxandall in his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy.