Michele Giambono

When Jacobello del Fiore, the leading painter in Venice, died in 1439, the direction of the mosaic workshop at St Mark's Basilica passed to Michele Giambono. It was a strange inheritance. Mosaic in Venice still belonged to the old Byzantine world, gold grounds and flat, weightless figures meant to shimmer in candlelight, a tradition already centuries old.

In the Mascoli Chapel, Giambono set scenes from the life of the Virgin against ranks of Gothic buildings and tried to give the figures real space to stand in, coaxing depth out of a medium built to refuse it. He was working partly from designs sent from Florence, where painters were already deep into perspective, and you can feel two eras meeting in that vault.

On panel he stayed closer to home, in the ornate International Gothic that Venice loved, all tooled gold, patterned brocades and slender, courtly saints. The Coronation of the Virgin here, from around 1448, is one of those altarpieces. He came from a whole family of Venetian artists and was the most gifted of them, and he kept painting in that gilded manner almost to his death around 1462, even as younger men in the city began turning toward the plainer light of the Renaissance.