Triptych of the Virgin and Child with Scenes from the Life of Christ

Venetian · c. 1320

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

Overall: 63.5 × 92.7 × 12.1 cm (25 × 36 1/2 × 4 13/16 in.); Left wing: 63.8 × 22.7 cm (25 1/8 × 8 15/16 in.); Center: 63.8 × 46.8 cm (25 1/8 × 18 7/16 in.); Right wing: 63.8 × 23 cm (25 1/8 × 9 1/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

This early fourteenth-century Venetian triptych is a refined example of the Italo-Byzantine tradition at its most devotional — gold-grounded, intimate in scale, and arranged to guide the eye through the mysteries of Christ's life with quiet authority. Venetian painters of this period worked at the crossroads of Byzantine icon-making and the emerging Italian Gothic style, producing works that feel at once ancient and newly tender. The tempera-on-panel technique, applied in thin, luminous layers over a gesso ground, gives the figures their characteristic flat yet glowing quality. The triptych format itself was designed for private use — the hinged wings meant a collector or patron could fold the work closed and reopen it like a devotional act, the imagery revealed as a kind of prayer. Works of this type served as portable altarpieces, accompanying patrons on travel or placed in private chapels, making them among the most personal religious objects of the medieval era. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates this centuries-old devotional object into a medium that honours its golden warmth and narrative detail, bringing the reverence of the original into a contemporary space without diminishing what made it matter.