page_title: Saint Luke painting the Virgin
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Saint Luke painting the Virgin / History
caption_attribution_description: Luke the Evangelist painting Vladimirskaya icon of Our Lady. Евангелист Лука, пишущий икону Богородицы. Сер. XVI в. Псковский музей-заповедник
context_page_description: Saint Luke painting the Virgin, is a devotional subject in art showing Luke the Evangelist painting the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus. Such paintings were often created during the Renaissance for chapels of Saint Luke in European churches, and frequently recall the composition of the Salus Populi Romani, an icon based on the legend of Luke's portrait of Mary. Versions of the subject were sometimes painted as the masterpiece that many guilds required an artist to submit before receiving the title of master.
context_section_description: Though not included in the canonic pictorial  of Mary's life, the scene became increasingly popular as Saint Luke gained his own devotional following as the patron saint of artists in general, and more specifically as patron saint of the Guild of Saint Luke, the most common name of local painters' guilds. The legend of Saint Luke as the author of the first Christian icons had been developed in Byzantium during the Iconoclastic Controversy, as attested by 8th century sources. By the 11th century, a number of images started being attributed to his authorship and venerated as authentic portraits of Christ and the Virgin Mary. In the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Luke's ascendancy paralleled a rise in status of painters themselves, whereas before the Renaissance, sculptors' guilds and their associated craftsmen — which also included masons and architects, as all worked with stone — tended to be regarded more highly than painters. Many Guilds of St. Luke were conglomerate associations of various professions, including painters, paint-mixers, book illuminators, and sellers of all of these things. Saddle-makers too were members of these guilds: like illuminators, who worked with vellum, they too painted on leather when creating the colorful military harness of the day.
caption: 16th-century Russian version showing copy of the Theotokos of Vladimir.
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