Vittore Carpaccio
The Virgin Reading

Cat:

My word, Mousey, I think you were right.

Mouse:

Naturally … right about what?

Cat:

Well, about your ‘tree theory’. Look, it's the same here: a tree that's bare, and a tree with lots of leaves. It even has loads of young branches sprouting out of the top.

Mouse:

And Mary is there, too. She's even the central figure in this painting, sitting all alone and reading. She has that golden circle around her head again, too – the halo. Only her son Jesus... he's somehow... not there.

Cat:

Yes he is! I've found him! Nothing escapes my sharp eyes! On the far left of the painting, where he used to sit, you can still see an arm and a foot.

Mouse:

Oh my! He's been chopped off!

Cat:

Huh, looks like it.

Mouse:

Poor Master Carpaccio! He took all that care and went to all that effort to paint his picture... and then…

Cat:

… someone went and sliced off part of it!

Mouse:

Some people don't appreciate art, that's all I can say! If only they'd known how difficult and time-consuming it was to paint a picture like this 500 years ago. Master Carpaccio would have had to buy special rocks and plants, dry them, grind them up, mix them and so on and so forth... before he even had the paints he needed to paint the picture.

Then he had to stretch a piece of material on a wooden frame, prepare it in various ways, transfer the preliminary drawing... a template with very fine lines that he could copy... all before he could even start painting, and that usually took several months. So a picture like this is a whole load of work!

Cat:

… even if that nice Master Carpaccio... sometimes copied his own stuff.

Mouse:

Copied his own stuff? How do you mean?

Cat:

Well... this woman sitting down... haven't we seen her somewhere before? Oh... I know! The big painting in the last room! The one where Mary was being born. There was a woman just like this, sitting on a low wall. Though she wasn't reading, she was doing something else. But she was wearing a dress like this one, made of shiny material, and she looked pretty similar.

Mouse:

So what? Why shouldn't Carpaccio make life easier for himself and paint a figure more than once – and even have her wearing the kind of pretty dress that was all the rage in Venice in his day? If it was a success and people liked his paintings, then why on earth not?