A Renaissance audience considered: the nuns at S. Apollonia and Castagno's Last Supper

The horizontal of achievement sustained in Castagno's frescoe at s Apollonia also leaves us contemplating certain issues. First among them may be by what mode the conceptual force and power of realization in these frescoe have the pair demanded and facilitated our relate to with reception. We recognize in the scale of the figures and in this spatial illusion a composition geared toward dramatic result that must needs provoke a visceral bodily answer in viewers, apart from, and also as conduit to, those reactions more structur by the agency of the common ground of cultural and theological preparedness in its audience. At the same time, we awe how a Renaissance artist dealt with the fact that of the like kind a work would not be publicly accessible. In other words, given the conventual adjoining matter how would the stricture of clausura have draw near to bear on Castagno's approach to the s Apollonia commission? His fresco of the equestrian Niccolo da Tolentino in the side aisle of the Duomo nears an obvious contrast in look up to to its accessibility. However, this comparison simultaneously signals us not to be too literal in our expectations of the impact of an immediate audience upon artistic intention and realization of a throw especially because, by this period, the notion of an ideal, broader, smooth future reception seems increasingly to inform--consciously or unconsciously--an artist's faculty of perception of his own output.