Author(s): John Witty; Laura Llewellyn

ARTS, DARKLY | ART... DARKLY

The foremost Venetian painter of the fourteenth century, Paolo Veneziano is regarded as the founder of the Venetian school of painting. Active from 1333 to 1358, Veneziano practiced his art within a culture enriched by Venice's maritime economy, with materials and techniques coming to his native city from Byzantium, Africa, Persia, and Asia. His workshop received prestigious commissions from Venice and beyond, many of them for elaborate altarpieces composed of painted panels within intricately carved gilt-wood frames. This volume, published by the Frick Collection in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, reunites, for the first time, the dispersed components of two of the rare surviving altarpieces and presents them alongside contemporaneous objects in various media. In doing so, it demonstrates how Veneziano's innovative and visually rich work engaged with fourteenth-century advances in manuscript illumination, ivory carving, textile production, and metalwork.