Domenico Veneziano

Bartolo da Venezia, Domenico di

Florentine, c. 1410 - 1461

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Italian Renaissance painter (1410-1461)

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In a landscape with chiseled, rocky mountains beyond a grassy meadow and stream, two men wearing dove-gray robes react to a flame-red cross in the sky in this nearly square painting. Both men have pale skin and their hair has been cut into a ring around each head. Their loose robes are cinched at the waist, and both have bare feet. The man to our left, with hands raised, kneels with his body angled to our right, facing the red cross in the sky, in the upper right corner of the painting. He has gray or blond hair and a flat gold halo edged with red. Five thin gold lines emanate from the red cross to touch the man’s hands, feet, and the right side of his chest. There is a red spot where one gold ray touches the palm of his right hand, closer to us. The second man, to our right, sits and leans back on one hand and holds his other hand to his brow as he looks up at the cross. He has dark hair. A small book with yellow pages and a red cover sits on the grass nearby. In the background, each of the three tall, pointed mountains nearly touch the top edge of the composition, and each is a different color, with icy, pale blue to our left, shell pink at the center, and light laurel green to our right. A stream running in front of the mountains turns a corner and comes our way in the lower right corner of the panel. The green meadow has a line of dark pine green trees and bushes behind the kneeling man and along the bottom left edge of the panel, near us. Wisps of white clouds float in the violet-purple sky above.
Domenico Veneziano, Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, c. 1445/1450, tempera on poplar panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.140

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

Domenico Veneziano · c. 1445/1450 · tempera on poplar panel ·  Accession ID  1939.1.140

Florentine 15th Century, Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, A Young Man Sitting on a Stool Reading a Book (recto); The Fall of Man (a fragment of the lower part) (verso), c. 1450, pen and brown ink heightened with white gouache on laid paper (recto); black chalk with pen and brown ink (verso), William B. O'Neal Fund and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 2009.91.1

A Young Man Sitting on a Stool Reading a Book (recto); The Fall of Man (a fragment of the lower part) (verso)

Florentine 15th Century, Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia · c. 1450 · pen and brown ink heightened with white gouache on laid paper (recto); black chalk with pen and brown ink (verso) ·  Accession ID  2009.91.1

Shown from the hips up, a woman to our left wears a sapphire-blue robe over a petal-pink dress, and she supports a pudgy, nude infant to our right in this vertical painting. Both have marble-white skin faintly tinged with green, wavy blond hair, and shiny gold halos. Their heads tilt toward each other so the woman’s cheek brushes the top of the baby’s head. She holds his body with one hand nearly flat against his torso and the other, covered with her robe, bracing his back. The baby holds the pinky of her hand against his chest with his left hand, on our right, and wraps his other arm around her heck. The woman looks down to our right with olive-green eyes under faint brows. She has a delicate nose and her pale, pink lips are parted. Her hair is covered by a sheer white cloth that falls over the shoulders of her blue robe, which is lined with golden yellow where it turns back around her neck. Her pink dress is trimmed with a band of moss green along the curving, sweetheart neckline and around the cuffs of her sleeves, and is ornamented with pearls and red, white, and blue orbs, possibly jewels. The baby looks at or toward us, his pink lips also parted and his rounded cheeks slightly blushed. He stands on his left foot, to our right, and raises his other foot, knee bent. Stylized white and pink roses with mint-green stems and leaves grow up against a royal-blue background behind the pair.
Domenico Veneziano, Madonna and Child, c. 1445/1450, tempera on poplar panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.221

Madonna and Child

Domenico Veneziano · c. 1445/1450 · tempera on poplar panel ·  Accession ID  1939.1.221

A young, nude, light-skinned man stands in the center of a rocky, mountainous landscape in this square painting. The man’s muscular body faces us but he turns his head in profile to our right as he looks down at the coral-red cloth he drops onto the ground. He is cleanshaven with prominent eyebrows, a straight nose, and his lips are slightly parted. He has thick, reddish-brown hair with bangs across his forehead, and there is a red-edged, glimmering, gold, plate-like halo across the crown of his head. He leans slightly to the side as he drops the red cloth onto a white one, already on the ground. With his other hand, he holds a fawn-brown animal skin or cloth over that shoulder. The man is surrounded by tan and parchment-brown, deeply ridged, mostly barren mountains. The pointed peaks nearly reach the top of the painting. The rocky mountains are interspersed with a few dark green bushes. A light blue stream curves in a shallow S shape along the right side of the painting. Peaks in the far distance are icy blue against a sky that deepens from topaz blue along the horizon to navy blue at the top edge. Some puffy and some thin white clouds float across the sky.
Domenico Veneziano, Saint John in the Desert, c. 1445/1450, tempera on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.48

Saint John in the Desert

Domenico Veneziano · c. 1445/1450 · tempera on panel ·  Accession ID  1943.4.48

Bibliography

1909

  • Testi, Laudedeo. La storia della pittura veneziana. 1. Le origini. Bergamo, 1909: 185-208, 534-535.

1936

  • Salmi, Mario. Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Domenico Veneziano. Rome, 1936. 2nd ed. Milan, 1938.

1952

  • Longhi, Roberto. "Il maestro di Pratovecchio." Paragone 25, no. 35 (1952): 10-37.

1954

  • Berti, Luciano. "Notizia di Domenico Veneziano." In Mostra di quattro maestri del primo rinascimento. Exh. cat. Palazzo Strozzi. 2nd ed. Florence, 1954: 79-83.

1980

  • Wohl, Hellmut. The Paintings of Domenico Veneziano. Oxford, 1980.

1992

  • De Marchi, Andrea. "Domenico Veneziano, Madonna con Bambino." In Una scuola per Piero: Luce, colore e prospettiva nella formazione fiorentina di Piero della Francesca. Edited by Luciano Bellosi. Exh. cat. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Venice, 1992: 68-72.

2003

  • Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al. Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003: 240.

2007

  • Guarnieri, Cristina. “Il passaggio tra due generazioni: dal Maestro dell’Incoronazione a Paolo Veneziano.” In Il secolo di Giotto nel Veneto. Edited by Giovanna Valenzano and Federica Toniolo. Venice, 2007: 153-177.