Venetian school, ca. 1350.

Venetian school, ca. 1350.
Circle of LORENZO VENEZIANO (1336-1379)
"Coronation of the Virgin."
Tempera and gold leaf on wood.
Measurements: 31 x 35 x 3,5 cm.

Important work, attributable to the environment of Lorenzo Veneziano, which represents an exquisite interpretation of the Coronation of the Virgin. It belongs to the aesthetic framework of the late Gothic Venetian school. It is a tempera on panel enriched with gold leaf, a technique characteristic of Italo-Byzantine art, still current in Venice at that time, although already tinged by the incipient influences of international Gothic. The composition presents the Virgin Mary and Christ seated on a marble bench, barely discernible due to the intense symbolic radiation of the golden background, which annuls any spatial depth in favor of a sacred, timeless and celestial plane. This fusion of the throne with the gold is not fortuitous, but acts as a visual strategy to integrate the figures into an idealized spiritual hierarchy, in keeping with the visual theology of the Trecento.

Christ appears characterized with golden hair, dressed in a crimson robe with rich embroidery at the neck. He places with sharp-fingered hands the crown on Mary's head, whose reaction is one of restrained and reverent grace. The long fingers and subtle gestures, as well as the elongation of necks and torsos, respond to a typically Gothic stylization, where spirituality is manifested through bodily slenderness.

Both characters have soft faces and almond-shaped eyes with marked irises, a resource still derived from the Byzantine world but reinterpreted in an emotional key, with a lyricism that prefigures the expressive softening of Venetian Gothic. The bare feet, an unusual but theologically charged detail, emphasize her humanity and the humility intrinsic to the divine act of coronation.

This panel, because of its format and dimensions, could have been part of a devotional polyptych or a dismembered altarpiece, perhaps an upper or lateral compartment of a predella. The closed, symmetrical and frontal structure of the whole, together with the intensive use of gold leaf and the lack of architectural perspective, place it within the Byzantine-Gothic aesthetic still dominant in Venice towards the middle of the 14th century.

His stylistic proximity to Lorenzo Veneziano (active between 1356 and 1372) is evident in the treatment of the faces, the design of the draperies with linear folds, and the introduction of more humanized details within a still hierarchical canon. Lorenzo was a fundamental precursor in the transition of Venetian painting from the rigid canons of the Eastern tradition to a greater Gothic delicacy and narrative expressiveness, influenced both by the Tuscan Trecento and the courtly tendencies of international Gothic.