Madonna and Child with two Votaries

Around 1330, Venice looked east as much as west. Its wealth came through the eastern Mediterranean, its greatest church glittered with Byzantine gold, and its painters learned from Greek icons. Paolo Veneziano was the leading painter of the city in those years, and this altarpiece shows exactly how he worked between two traditions. The Virgin sits against a gold ground, and the Christ Child appears inside an almond-shaped frame on her breast, a Greek way of picturing the heavenly Virgin. The two small figures kneeling at her feet, the votaries who paid for the panel, come instead from a western habit of placing the donor inside the sacred scene. It is tempera on wood over gold, and one of the most complete things Paolo left. That child set in the almond on her breast is the Byzantine image called the Platytera, the Virgin wider than the heavens, carried straight into a Venetian altarpiece.