Madonna of Veveří

This panel was painted in Bohemia around 1345, when Prague under Charles the Fourth was turning into one of the great capitals of Europe, soon to have its own university and archbishop. We do not know the painter's name, so he is called simply the Master of the Veveri Madonna, after this very picture, which long hung near Veveri Castle outside Brno. The Virgin holds the Christ child cheek to cheek, a tender type that Bohemian painters of the time borrowed from Italian and Byzantine models and made gentler. The gold behind her is not sky but heaven, the standard way of setting a holy figure outside ordinary space and time.