Virgin and Child

Of all the names in early Florentine painting, Domenico Veneziano is one of the rarest to hold in your hands. Only a small handful of works survive that scholars accept as securely his, which makes every panel attached to his name a matter of careful argument, this small Virgin and Child among them. He worked in Florence in the middle of the 15th century and was admired for a soft, even daylight that fell gently across faces and cloth, a quieter alternative to the harder line of his contemporaries. Giorgio Vasari, the early biographer, spread a story that Domenico was murdered by a jealous rival painter, though the dates show it cannot be true. This tempera panel came to Bucharest with King Carol I, whose 19th-century taste for early Italian primitives shaped the museum's Renaissance rooms.