Professor Butter Beard and Donatello’s “Madonna of the Clouds”
“So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”
- Virginia Woolf, “To the Lighthouse”
Lately, I have been thinking of clouds (and final projects and exams, crowing Scottish witches, coronations and sexy equerries, the debate over cutting my winter curls for summer, and lions and tigers and bears). Oh my. Yes, it is my extremely crazy season, and my moments of escape are usually during daybreak hikes with my dog-wife, as we watch the sun mystically emerge through the cotton candy clouds and we consciously breathe it in together. I have a strong sense that we both understand there is always hope in the knowledge that no cloud is so dark that the sun can’t shine through.
Donatello understood clouds as well. He was able to carve shallow figures into marble that shift and ripple like wind, or water, or clouds. He recognized that our journeys change and often we have little control over these changes. But marble endures. And I get ahead of myself……
Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, writes, “Donatello was a revolutionary in sculptural practice.” He worked with a full range of materials and techniques, received major commissions from both church and state, and was a personal favorite of the powerful Medici banking family. Within a century after the artist’s death, the painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari revered his as a “genius” whose works rivalled the much-revered art of ancient Greece and Rome.
Art historians now agree that Donatello’s many talents flowed from his deep understanding of his materials and his skill at manipulating them. His remarkable marble-carving skills came out of his early experience in the 15th century workshops run by the Opera del Duomo in Florence, and he is widely credited with conceiving the difficult carving technique known as “rilieve stiacciato,” or “squashed relief.” His contemporary reviewers likened it to “sculpted air,” which they attributed to his goldsmith training where he learned to create delicately chiseled surfaces.
His “Madonna of the Clouds” is a small, 12” square marble relief presenting the Virgin and Child at rest in the skies accompanied by eight mid-flight angels. At the center, Mary sits on a bank of clouds, holding her infant in her lap, her left hand pressing into his arm to keep him close. The baby looks directly at the viewer as if to assure us that we are also safe and secure. Donatello creates a sense of slow movement and subtle energy through the dance of the angels as they emerge from the clouds. This actually aids to highlight the powerful stillness of the central figures. His rilieve stiacciato technique allows for this extraordinary vision in the heavens, where wind, atmosphere and the flying angels are made permanent in marble.
Marietta Cambareri, Senior Curator of European Sculpture at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, writes: “If a family owned one work of art in Renaissance Florence, it was likely a Madonna and Child, a devotional object around which domestic life and religious experience centered.” She imagines that one work may have accompanied a person throughout their life. A child might have been encouraged to feel close to the infant Jesus by placing flowers in front of the Madonna. A young bride might have lit a candle nearby and contemplated her future as a mother. An elderly woman might have recalled holding her children in her arms. “These works would have changed in meaning over the course of a Renaissance owner’s life,” she concludes.
Change over the course of a life, like clouds drifting across the permanence of the sky.
These clouds followed me into my kitchen this week. I was inspired to create my own version of a “Tres Leches” cake. The golden cake, scented with freshly grated nutmeg, is bathed with a rich potion of three milks while still warm from the oven. To lighten the overall experience, the soaked cake is then topped with a fluffy marshmallow-like toasted cloud of vanilla bean meringue, like “clouds that have dropped down into the sea.”
Thank you, Donatello. And thank you, Virginia Wolfe. You remind us that the sky and the sun are always there. It is the clouds that come and go.
Professor Butter Beard’s Tres Leches Cake
One 9” by 13” meringue-topped cake
Cake:
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ¾ cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla paste
3 ¼ cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp fine sea salt
½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 ½ cups buttermilk
Tres Leches:
¼ cup whole milk
1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk
Meringue:
1 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup water
4 large egg whites, room temperature
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp vanilla paste
½ tsp fine sea salt
1) Preheat your oven to 325 degrees and spray a 9/13” baking pan with baking spray with flour.
2) In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and soda, salt and grated nutmeg. Set aside.
3) In a standing mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl as needed. On a low speed, add the eggs, one at a time, to fully incorporate. Add the vanilla and mix to fully combine.
4) Alternately, add the dry mix and the buttermilk (ending with the dry mix). Spread the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 45 to 50 minutes until a wooden skewer comes out clean.
5) While the cake bakes, whisk together the “tres leche.”
6) Remove the cake from the oven and let it stand for 10 minutes. Using a wooden chop stick, poke holes into the warm cake (all over). Use a small ladle to slowly pour the “tres leches” all over the cake, letting it soak into the warm cake. Once the cake has cooled to room temperature, loosely cover the cake with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least four hours.
7) For the meringue: In a small saucepan, bring the sugar and 1/3 cup water to a boil over medium-high heat and cook until the mixture reaches 250 degrees on a candy thermometer. In the bowl of a standing mixer with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Increase the mixer speed to high and slowly pour the hot sugar mixture into the egg whites in a slow steady stream. Beat until smooth and glossy peaks form. Beat in the vanilla and salt. Spread the meringue over the chilled cake and artistically brown with a kitchen blow torch.
