Santa-Lucia-de’-Magnoli-Altar

Around 1445 in Florence, altarpieces still tended to keep their saints in separate gilded compartments, each in its own little frame. Domenico Veneziano did something newer here. He put the Madonna and four saints together under one airy portico, standing on the same floor, lit by a single daylight that falls from the upper right and casts real shadows on the pink and green marble. Art historians often call this the first true sacra conversazione, a holy conversation where everyone shares one space. The orange trees poking over the wall and the colored stone belong to a Florence just discovering how to build depth with light rather than gold. The small scenes that once ran beneath it are now scattered between museums in Washington, Berlin and Cambridge.