Domenico Veneziano in Context: Reassessing Florentine Visual Culture in the 1440s

Despite his accepted status as one of the most innovative painters of the 15th century, Domenico Veneziano remains an astonishingly understudied artist. Her PhD proposal builds on her graduate work to date to advance an innovative monographic study of the artist, which will situate his key works as site-specific projects for particular Florence contexts, re-evaluated against contemporary works as opposed to being inserted into a teleological and retrospectively sanctioned chain of progress. In other words, her project will juxtapose Veneziano's work with the general run of Florentine artistic patronage in the 1440s to gain greater purchase on the novelty of his public works within the cityscape. In particular, she will focus on Domenico Veneziano's work in three of the most significant genres of Florentine public art - altarpieces, chapel frescoes and street tabernacles - juxtaposing them with contemporary public commissions by other artists. Their comparison with Domenico Veneziano's work will grant us additional purchase on what modernity meant for the Florentine audiences of the period. Adopting this unusual perspective, considering the environments for which artworks were conceived as well as contemporary but more 'conservative' artistic production, her project seeks to correct misleading and decontextualized interpretations of the great masterpieces of mid-15th-century Florentine painting.