Medieval Paintings
Medieval Paintings
Medieval paintings joined religious practice and storytelling with the decoration of churches, monasteries, homes, and civic buildings. Wall paintings, panel images, and manuscript illumination used different materials and scales to make sacred figures and narratives visible. In Italy, egg tempera and gold leaf gave altarpieces clear color and reflective surfaces, while fresco cycles unfolded stories across architectural spaces. Large altarpieces could join separate panels within an elaborate frame, placing the Virgin and Child among saints. Smaller narrative pictures along the base, called a predella, extended the main image with episodes from sacred lives. Portable panels also served private altars, linking painting with prayer in the home. Byzantine and Gothic traditions offered varied approaches to sacred presence, while painters such as Cimabue and Simone Martini developed individual treatments of gesture, expression, and setting.
Italian Painting around 1300: Florence and Siena
Between the late 1200s and the early 1300s, painters in Florence and Siena brought different approaches to Christian images, from the forms of a devotional panel to the narrative space of a fresco. Cimabue and Giotto developed the Florentine tradition, while Duccio and Simone Martini gave Sienese painting its own approaches to line, color, and the arrangement of sacred figures.
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