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In many cases this process has not only made possible the remounting of frescoes but has also laid bare the long-hidden preliminary sketches, or sinopias, drawn on the underneath layers of plaster. The current exhibit includes 24, which have been mounted separately and are shown next to their frescoes.
Leonine Shepherd. "These drawings are often surprisingly modern," observes Claus Virch, the Met's curator of European painting. "There is an expressiveness to them not found in the fresco." In some cases, a comparison of the sinopia with the fresco has revealed surprising differences. The sinopia beneath Andrea del Castagno's muscular St. Jerome [on this page and opposite] is no more like the finished fresco than the youthful Dorian Gray was like his aging portrait. The sinopia shows a handsome young man; the fresco, a gnarled and suffering ascetic. The difference is so striking that Princeton's Renaissance scholar Millard Meiss suggests that perhaps the sinopia was by a different artist.
While the Met's visiting exhibit does not—and cannot—include any of the near-legendary series of frescoes to which pilgrims trek, vignettes from major masters, together with larger pictures by significant unknowns, have been included. Giotto, Italy's first great fresco painter, is represented by a fragment showing the leonine head of a shepherd, Piero della Francesca by a lone saint. The gentle spirit of Fra Angelico is manifest in a lunette from the Florentine cloister of San Marco. It portrays St. Peter Martyr (a 13th century Dominican monk) putting his finger to his lips to enjoin the monks to silence.
Lilac Coif. Three of the most diverting larger pictures are by anonymous masters. The Prato Master is responsible for an exuberant Birth of the Virgin, in which graceful Florentine ladies foreshadow those in a similar scene by Ghirlandaio. The ironic hand of The Master of the Cloister of the Orange Trees can be seen in two scenes from the life of St. Benedict.
The masterpiece of the exhibition is easily Jacopo Pontormo's Annunciation. Rarely, in this country, has the troubling 16th century mannerist been represented by such an ethereal, yet commanding, picture. Looming above the onlooker, Pontormo's Angel Gabriel is shown as a dissipated Florentine gallant with an exquisite shell-pink ear, hennaed locks and a flattened head. As for the Virgin Mary, she is both innocent and sophisticated, a strangely languorous vessel of the Lord, whose fashionable lilac coif emits a greenish, phosphorescent glow.