766, 767. HEADS OF SAINTS.
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.