The Birth of the Virgin

Fra Carnevale's Birth of the Virgin, painted around 1467 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a masterpiece of mid-fifteenth-century Italian painting that showcases an extraordinary architectural setting. Fra Carnevale (Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini), a painter-friar from Urbino who studied under Filippo Lippi, created in this work one of the most ambitious architectural interiors in quattrocento painting, reflecting the spatial sophistication of the Urbino court.

The painting's monumental classical architecture, rendered with exacting perspective, dominates the composition, creating a vast, luminous interior space within which the intimate domestic scene of the Virgin's birth unfolds.