page_title: Sacra conversazione
section_title: Landscape settings
hierarchical_section_title: Sacra conversazione / Development / Landscape settings
caption_attribution_description: The Sacra conversazione is a composition in which the Virgin and Child are surrounded by saints of different historical eras, and on occasions, by donors (as in the present example). The kneeling figure leaning towards the Virgin, who draws the Christ Child’s attention to him, has been tentatively identified as Francesco Priuli. Priuli was one of Palma Vecchio’s patrons in Venice and was Procurator of the Republic in 1522.
context_page_description: In art, a sacra conversazione, meaning holy conversation, is a genre developed in Italian Renaissance painting, with a depiction of the Virgin and Child amidst a group of saints in a relatively informal grouping, as opposed to the more rigid and hierarchical compositions of earlier periods. Donor portraits may also be included, generally kneeling, often their patron saint is presenting them to the Virgin, and angels are frequently in attendance.
  The term is often used as a title for paintings to avoid listing all the individual figures, although the trend in museums and academic art history is now to give the full list. The name, which only appears as a title retrospectively in the 18th century, has been explained with reference to "their rapt stillness of mood, in which the Saints, scarcely looking at one another, seem to communicate at a spiritual rather than a material level". At least that is the case in earlier examples; later ones, from the 16th century onwards, often give the impression of more conventional conversations between the figures, who lean towards one another and interact more.
context_section_description: Also in the 1510s, Titian and other Venetians had been developing the mostly northern tradition of outside settings in a garden or, especially later, an open landscape.  The height of Giorgione's Castelfranco Madonna in about 1503 had allowed a landscape to show above the lower zone with the saints. Palma Vecchio became a specialist in strongly horizontal sacre conversatione, with the figures mostly seated or kneeling in a rather tight group, combining informality and a monumental classicism. Such compositions also drew on traditional outdoor groups featuring the Holy Family such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Adoration of the Shepherds and Madonna and Child compositions with angels and other figures.
  A group of figures placed in an enclosed garden are known as hortus conclusus, and when the subject is Mary surrounded by female saints it is known as a Virgo inter Virgines.  These were a northern speciality, where several of the figures beside the Virgin were sitting, on a bench or bank or on the ground, usually in a garden setting within an enclosure of some sort – originally a metaphor for the Virgin's womb, as the hortus conclusus began as a representation of the Annunciation, marking Mary's conception of Christ. These more relaxed groups were continued in Venetian paintings set in open landscape.  By the end of the century, "the dominant relationships in an altarpiece such as Annibale Carracci’s Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and John the Evangelist (1593, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna) were not between the figures within the picture but between them and the spectator." By "Baroque painting the Virgin is removed from the earth whenever the context allows", and the scenes are often set among the heavenly clouds.
  Examples in sculpture are relatively rare, if only because of the number of figures involved.  One exception was planned by Michelangelo for the Medici Chapel in Florence, though he left the project before the two Medici patron saints flanking his Virgin and Child were done; these were made by others following his designs.
caption: Landscape setting with a donor portrait, Palma Vecchio, c. 1519
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