Coronation of the Virgin

Giovanni di Paolo's Coronation of the Virgin at the Metropolitan Museum, painted around 1455, presents the celestial crowning of Mary by Christ amid the heavenly court in the visionary, ecstatically colored style that is this painter's hallmark. Giovanni di Paolo was the most original and idiosyncratic Sienese painter of the fifteenth century, developing a personal vision of sacred subjects that combined the gold-ground formalism of his medieval predecessors with a nervous, expressionistic linearity all his own. His Coronations of the Virgin are among his most characteristic subjects — vast celestial gatherings of angels and saints arranged around the central act of crowning, executed in brilliant jeweled color with flattened, decorative figures that deliberately resist the spatial rationalism of Florentine Renaissance painting. The Metropolitan Museum holds several works from Giovanni di Paolo's extensive late career, including this Coronation and multiple predella panels, making it one of the best places outside Siena to assess his achievement. The Coronation of the Virgin was the culminating image of the Marian cycle, the moment when Mary's intercessory role was definitively established by her enthronement as Queen of Heaven.

The celestial court is arranged in a composition of Giovanni di Paolo's typical inventiveness, with his distinctive angular figures and vivid, sometimes jarring colors creating an effect of visionary intensity.