SACRED CONVERSATION (SACRED CONVERSATION). - A composition in which images of saints are depicted in attitudes and expressions of conversation, either among themselves or with the Virgin and Child.
There are hints of it in the fourteenth century, but the genre reaches full development in the first decades of the fifteenth century; the animation of the figures, the spontaneity of the affections lead to a participation in real life, owing to the irruption of the humanistic conception of life into the new figurative canons of art.
In the Tuscan school of the mid-fifteenth century the theme of the S. C. appears for the first time: in an intimate conversation Sts. Cosmas and Damian, Francis and Lawrence, Anthony and Peter Martyr are gathered two by two around John the Baptist in a rectangular marble exedra against the background of a garden, in Filippo Lippi's painting of 1457-58 which is in London at the National Gallery. However, this type of S. C. had no following among painters. While in Tuscany the theme of the S. C. dies out or assumes a different grandeur in complex altarpieces, from the end of the fifteenth century it is chiefly treated by the Venetians. At the beginning there is a composition in which, in three-quarter length, on either side of the central figures of the Madonna and Child, one or more saints are represented turned toward the central group, against a landscape background or a dark background: it was Giovanni Bellini who initiated this compositional scheme in the S. C. of 1502 which is in the Galleria of Venice, taken up a little later in the admirable composition by Lotto of 1508 which is in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. The author of numerous open-air S. C.s is Cima da Conegliano. Only with Titian, who abolishes the centrifugal composition, does the S. C. resolve itself into a lively conversation between the Virgin and the saints, between saint and saint, in three-quarter figure against the background of a wall or a curtain in two opposing groups, so that the center is no longer given by a dominant group, but by the relationship that passes between the various figures through the direction of their gazes and their gestures: St. Bridget in the S. C. of Madrid at the Prado Gallery offers a little basket of roses to the Child who in turn seems to want to offer it to the Madonna, and St. John the Baptist in the S. C. of Dresden of 1515 himself helps to hold the Child Jesus upright, taking intimate part in the divine group.
Alongside the S. C. that unfolds in a closed and severe setting, there is at the same time a full development of the open-air S. C., brought about by Palma il Vecchio, who in his balanced compositions achieves a sense of pastoral idyll. In a broad landscape many saints are seated or kneeling in harmonious disorder around the Virgin and Child, often accompanied by St. Joseph, as in that of the Accademia of Venice. At times these S. C.s take their motif from the presentation to the holy Virgin by the saints of one or more donors arranged on a level lower than that of the sacred images; thus in the S. C. of Naples by Palma of 1523-25 two donors are kneeling at the foot of the raised platform where Mary and the saints stand, and on their behalf St. Jerome and St. John direct recommendations to the Virgin, while the Child watches them attentively. Maria Laura De Nicola