Nursing Madonna

The image of the Virgin nursing her child came to Italy from the icons of the Byzantine East, and in Venice, a city that traded with Constantinople and filled St Mark's with its mosaics, painters kept that memory alive longer than anywhere else. The museum sees exactly that here. Giambono joins the refinements of late Gothic painting, the tooled gold and the brocade of the Virgin's mantle, to techniques and habits that still look back to Byzantium.

The panel is only about a third of a metre high, and the museum thinks it was once the centre of a small polyptych made for private prayer, later taken apart and scattered. Giambono worked in Verona as well as Venice. His largest work in the city is a fresco of 1432 in the church of Sant'Anastasia, painted around the equestrian monument of the soldier Cortesia Serego.