The Dormition of the Virgin

Gherardo Starnina painted this Dormition of the Virgin around 1405 for the Art Institute of Chicago's collection. The Dormition was a key subject in Byzantine and Western Christian art, depicting the Virgin's peaceful death surrounded by the apostles who were miraculously transported to her bedside. This work belongs to the Early Renaissance, the transformative period in European art when painters first applied mathematical perspective, naturalistic figure modeling, and archaeological interest in antiquity to the inherited traditions of medieval devotional painting. The tension between Gothic grace and Renaissance structure gives art of this period a distinctive energy.

Starnina organizes the complex multi-figure scene within a shallow architectural space, using his refined tempera technique to render individual expressions of grief among the apostles gathered around the recumbent Virgin.