Saints Augustine and Peter

Paolo Veneziano was the founding master of the Venetian school, the first painter to translate the weightless divinities of Byzantium into the architecture and sweetness of the Gothic West. This halved pair of saints once flanked the Virgin in the upper register of a polyptych: Augustine vested as bishop with crozier and book, Peter with the keys, both standing against burnished gold with the pointed shoes and nervous drapery that Paolo, close to the circle of Doge Andrea Dandolo, made the house style of Venice. Completed about the middle of the fourteenth century, the panel joins the slender group of works securely tied to him between 1333 and 1358. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.