The Saints St. John the Baptist and St. Matthew

For a long time these two saints, John the Baptist and the evangelist Matthew, stood against dark, blank backgrounds, and everyone took that for Vivarini's own work. In 1949 a restorer named Mauro Pelliccioli cleaned the panels and found the dark was later paint. The garments had been gone over too, and behind the figures lay two quiet landscapes that the overpaint had buried, pale water and low hills of the kind that ring the Venetian lagoon. The panels are tempera from about 1480 and probably once belonged to a larger altarpiece in the church of San Pietro Martire on Murano.