_Domenico Veneziano_ (died 1461).
Though Domenico describes himself as Venetian (as on the
signature to 1215), he worked at Perugia and Florence, and his
works belie any connection with Venetian art. Between 1439 and
1445 he was engaged in the church of S. Maria Nuova, in which
work he was assisted by his pupil Piero della Francesca.
These pictures have perished. The works by his hand we possess
give no evidence of his being an oil painter, but he is known
to have used oil, and indeed was celebrated as one of the
earliest Italian painters in that medium. Vasari's story about
Andrea del Castagno's jealousy, and his murder of Domenico
in consequence, is disproved by documentary evidence showing
that Domenico survived his alleged murderer by five years.
Domenico's only known works, now extant, are an altar-piece in
the Uffizi and the work described below.
These heads are from the niche or tabernacle which contained the
Madonna and Child, No. 1215. The work was executed for the Canto
(street corner) de' Carnesecchi in Florence. It is thus referred to by
Vasari:--
Being invited to Florence, the first thing Domenico did was to
paint a tabernacle in fresco, at the corner of the Carnesecchi,
in the angle of the two roads, leading, the one to the new, the
other to the old Piazza of Santa Maria Novella. The subject of
this work is a Virgin surrounded by various saints, and as it
pleased the Florentines greatly and was much commended by the
artists of the time, as well as by the citizens, this picture
awakened bitter rage and envy against poor Domenico in the
ill-regulated mind of Andrea (ii. 99--here follows Vasari's
rattling and reckless story of Domenico's murder by the jealous
Andrea del Castagno).
For centuries Domenico's work was exposed to wind and weather. The
heads, Nos. 766, 767, passed into the possession of Sir Charles
Eastlake, from whose collection they were purchased for the National
Gallery in 1867. The central fresco (No. 1215) was in 1851 detached
from the wall and badly restored. It was subsequently acquired by Lord
Lindsay, the author of _Sketches of the History of Christian Art_,
whose son, James, Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, presented it to the
nation in 1886.