Venetian/Tuscan Paintings

To critics accustomed to the style of fifteenth-century narrative paintings by Italian artists from Tuscany, the Venetian examples of narrative paintings with religious subjects that Patricia Fortini Brown analyzes in a recent book will come as a great surprise. While the Tuscan paintings present large-scale figures, clear narratives, and simple settings, the consisting almost exclusively of vernacular chronicles of local events embroidered with all kinds of inconsequential detail.

And yet, while Venetian attitudes toward history that are reflected in their art account in part for the difference in style between Venetian and Tuscan narrative paintings, Brown has overlooked some practical influences, such as climate. Tuscan churches are filled with frescoes that, in contrast to Venetian narrative paintings, consist mainly of of written history and were made all the more authoritative by a proliferation of circumstantial detail.

Moreover, because painting frescoes requires an unusually sure hand, particularly in the representation of the human form, the development of drawing skill was central to artistic training in Tuscany, and by 1500 the public there tended to distinguish artists on the basis of how well they could draw human figures. In Venice, because painting architecture in perspective was seen as a particular test of the Venetian painter’s skill.