The Assumption of the Virgin

The Orthodox and the Catholic calendars both keep 15 August for the Virgin, and they picture the day differently. The Orthodox feast is her falling asleep, the body laid on a bier with the apostles around it. This canvas shows her rising, carried up into heaven, which is the Western version of the subject, and the formula behind it had been settled in Venetian altarpieces two centuries earlier. Titian's Assumption in the Frari church is the best known of them. The Ionian islands were under Venetian rule for the whole of this painter's working life, which put the Catholic repertoire within easy reach of a Greek Orthodox painter, and he used it. The National Gallery's record gives this picture no date at all, only the medium and the size, 45 by 34 centimetres, the same measurements as his Dormition of the Virgin of about 1753.