Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints

Paying pictorial homage to a new architectural grandeur, this later fifteenth-century Sacra Conversazione followed one painted by Antonello da Messina for San Cassiano. The altarpiece was installed in the sacristy of San Michele in Isola on Murano. Sts Peter, Romuald, Benedict, and Paul are seen from left to right, standing below a mock-mosaic cupola, with open skies glimpsed behind them and the Mother and Child. Continued by Giorgione, with fewer saints, in the Castelfranco Madonna, such compositions remained alive and well in Venetian art in the sixteenth century.