.
Lippi's Madonna, on the other hand, is very realistic and attractive. Her shape is on point, she looks to be properly portioned to the rest of the work, and she is quite beautiful. The baby Jesus in Cimabue's piece is also out of proportion. The size of the baby is almost as large as the adult angels and men in the painting. This does not portray the idea of "new naturalism " that Cimabue was believed to have pursued. In Lippi's piece, the baby Jesus, like Madonna, is proportional and shaped very well. The baby actually looks like a baby instead of a little man, and it is much more appealing than Cimabue's. Overall, all of the characters portrayed in Lippi's Madonna are of much superior form compared to those of Cimabue, and therefor Lippi is winning the throwdown by a score one to zero.
In round two, we will look at the visual texture of the works, particularly the texture of the characters' clothing in each. In Cimabue's Madonna Enthroned with Angels and Prophets, the robes of both Madonna and child look like steel to me. The folds aren't very natural looking; they appear to be stiff and malleable to me, like metal. This is a very poor representation of the drapery. I will give Cimabue some slack in this category though, because in pieces before his time, paintings were generally flat and showed no effective texture whatsoever. Because of this, I give him props for his articular advancement and using the gold embellishment to create folds in the robes, even though it's a poor representation of the texture of a real robe in my opinion.
In Lippi's "Madonna," the visual texture of the robes of all of the characters is extravagant to say the least. They look like real, naturally falling pieces of clothing. They don't look stiff and pliable like Cimabue's, and they look as if I could actually reach out and feel the softness of a real robe. The representation of skin texture in each work is a bit different as well.
