Andy Warhol Details of Renaissance Paintings ( F & S II.316A) For Sale

Piero Della Francesca, Madonna Del Duca Da Montefeltro is a unique edition screenprint published by the artist in 1984, depicting a semi-dome from which an ostrich egg hangs. As in the title, it is a detail from a painting by early Renaissance painter, Pierro della Francesca, that in its full version portrays a religious scene whereby an enthroned Virgin Mary and Child are enclosed by a group of Saints. Piero Della Francesca is the first in the Details of Renaissance Paintings series of four, in which Warhol looks to Italian masters including Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Paolo Uccello for inspiration.  

Throughout the Details of Renaissance Paintings series, Warhol grappled with exponential historical and artistic subject matter that appears to be diametrically opposed to his repertoire of celebrity and pop-cultural imagery. This present print is no exception, and the painting of which it is based was in fact gifted to its museum in Milan by none other than Napoleon. Furthermore, its very nature belongs to a genre of religious painting, the sacra conversazione (sacred conversation) whereby a gathering takes place with the Virgin and child and Saints. The ostrich egg that hangs from the dome is unusual and ambiguous: most commonly, the egg as a symbol of fertility is associated with the Immaculate conception. Its tenuous link by a single thread, juxtaposed against the architectural robustness of the arch, is an image that borders on surreal.  

Warhol’s artistic decision to crop the figurative scene of the Virgin and child from his rendition of the image can be seen as a bold one, even sacrilegious. It is certainly not unusual for Warhol to shock the viewer in this way by turning the classical into the post-modern: however, in this version the viewer appreciates the architectural details of the semi-dome, and the detail of the egg, with its central position. Della Francesca was a known mathematician as well as an artist: ‘he did an extraordinary degree of meticulous, time-consuming, geometrical care over the perspectival projection of architectural forms’. Warhol’s choice to hone in on this meticulous detail points to his conscientiousness of the formal qualities of the work, so much so that the ostrich egg suspended against the dome becomes an artwork in its own right. 

In Details of Renaissance Paintings, Warhol enters a dialogue with some of the greatest minds beyond cultural and historic boundaries. In this series one appreciates both the mastery of two icons of on either side of the artistic spectrum, five centuries apart. In this late stage of Warhol’s career, it is almost as if he returns full circle to a reeducation of art history, having started out painting modern icons of his own day and age and revisiting the past.