The Birth of the Virgin

Fra Carnevale painted this scene of the birth of Mary in 1467, for the church of Santa Maria della Bella in Urbino. It is one of two panels from the same altarpiece that survived, both now at the Met. The other panel shows the Presentation of the Virgin. The painting is tall and narrow, 57 by 38 inches. Saint Anne lies in a bed at the upper right, recovering from childbirth, attended by women who bring food and pour water. Below and to the left, two servant women wash the newborn Mary in a basin, their movements careful and domestic. A third woman enters from the left carrying a tray. The room is a Renaissance interior with a coffered ceiling, tiled floor, and a view through an archway to a distant cityscape. The colors are pale: rose, green, cream, and soft blue, with gold leaf on the architectural details. Fra Carnevale was a Dominican friar and painter from Urbino, trained in Florence under Filippo Lippi. He was about 51 when he painted this. He was not a prolific artist; only a handful of works are securely attributed to him. This painting and its companion panel were cut down from a larger altarpiece and lost their upper sections. They were acquired by the Met in 1935 and 1936, recognized as a pair decades later by the curator Everett Fahy. The painting is remarkable for its architectural setting. Fra Carnevale devoted more space to the room than to the figures, painting a deep perspective interior with columns, arches, and a receding ceiling that would have been at the cutting edge of perspective theory in 1460s Urbino. Piero della Francesca was working in Urbino at the same time, and Fra Carnevale's spatial construction shows the influence of Piero's mathematical approach to perspective. Tempera and oil on wood, 145 by 96 centimeters. Fra Carnevale used traditional egg tempera for the flesh tones and the gold ground, but he also used oil glazes for the architectural elements, a hybrid technique that was spreading through central Italy in the 1460s. The surface is smooth and detailed, with fine brushwork in the tiled floor and the distant cityscape visible through the arch. The tall vertical format and pale Renaissance palette make this print work well in a hallway, entryway, or beside a tall window. The architectural detail rewards close viewing, so a 16x20 or 18x24 size is better than the smaller options. A gold or natural wood frame picks up the painting's gilded architecture. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1935, purchased with the Rogers and Gwynne Andrews Funds. It is on view in the European Paintings galleries. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.