The Marriage of the Virgin

The Marriage of the Virgin is one of the very few panel paintings by Michelino da Besozzo to survive — the Museum’s catalogue of its North Italian pictures counts the surviving body of his work as two panels together with a handful of miniatures and drawings — and it preserves the art of the great Lombard illuminator at full scale. Michelino, recorded as active from 1388 until about 1450, worked at Pavia and in the Veneto before settling in Milan, where he served the Visconti dukes and was commissioned to design windows for their cathedral; his reputation in his own day rested chiefly on illuminated manuscripts, and his linear, exquisitely finished manner belongs to the International Gothic rather than to the classicizing Renaissance then taking shape in Florence. The gold ground, with its embossed and gilded halos and ornament, shows how closely his panel painting grew out of the illuminator’s craft. Painted about 1430, the panel entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1943.