Painting at the Threshold: Pictures for Doors in Renaissance Venice

Abstract

Paintings belonging to domestic interior doors and shutters form a distinct genre within Venetian Renaissance art. Originally posssitioned at privileged thresholds, such as the boundary between two chambers or the front of a substantial cabinet, these works exhibit characteristic structural, decorative, and compositional features. Restoration of surviving and documented pictures to their embedded settings illuminates the complexity of internal arrangements in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century palace. Attention to individual ensembles reveals that the doorway constituted a site of artistic innovation, hosting paintings with novel subjects and expressive interests that in turn related to the works' unique location and function.