Painter

Domenico Veneziano was probably a Florentine painter, although his name implies Venetian origin. The date of his birth is unknown, but he is first recorded in 1438, in Perugia, when he wrote to the Medici in Florence asking for a job. He may have been successful in this, for he was working in Sant' Egidio (S.M. Nuova) in Florence 1439—45, on frescoes which are now lost. One of his helpers was Piero della Francesca, and Domenico's greatest influence on the future was probably through Piero rather than in Florence proper. His main concern was with the mutation of colour by light, a subject that hardly interested the Florentines, obsessed as they were by drawing. In recent years there have been attempts to represent Domenico as the most important influence after Masaccio, but there are only two signed pictures by him and barely half-a-dozen plausibly attributed. What is probably his earliest surviving work is the Camesecchi Madonna and two Saints from the same street tabernacle (London, NG); these fresco fragments are in bad condition, but the Madonna is signed. The other signed picture is his masterpiece, the St Lucy Altarpiece, painted for Sta Lucia de' Magnoli in Florence and now dispersed. The main panel is still in Florence (Uffizi), but the predelle are in Berlin, Cambridge (Fitzwm) and Washington (NG): the main panel, of the Madonna and Child with Saints, is one of the earliest sacre conversazioni. The date is unknown, but it has been suggested that Domenico had painted, before this, the lower half of Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin (Paris, Louvre), and after the St Lucy Altar he was sufficiently influenced by Castagno to paint the Baptist and St Francis (Florence, Sta Croce): there is no compulsion to believe either of these theories. One of the few things known with certainty about him is that he died in 1461, and therefore could not have been murdered by Castagno, who died in 1457. Nevertheless, this story was current in Florence in the late 15th century.

Other works attributed to him are in Berlin, Boston (Gardner), Bucharest, New York (Met. Mus.) and Washington (NG).

Domenico Veneziano rarities @ ebay.com (direct link to rarities) - just checked and a bigger selection than I have seen anywhere else