Madonna Pisa

This panel was painted around 1250, in a Tuscany that had not yet met the change coming to it. Cimabue was barely born and Giotto was decades away, and painters still worked in the manner Italians called the maniera greca, the Greek style learned from Byzantine icons. So the Virgin sits facing you straight on, her figure laid flat against a ground of gold, her features drawn in long solemn lines rather than shaped by light. Pisa in these years was a wealthy maritime republic, its great cathedral square already rising, and a devotional image like this would have stood above a church altar for the faithful to pray before. The gold leaf behind her was laid down to catch the light of candles in a dark church, so that to anyone kneeling below, the figure seemed to glow.