Vittore Carpaccio
The Virgin Reading

Mary is reading a book, giving it all her attention and completely focused on the text. We're looking at her diagonally from the rear as she sits on a parapet. 

Unlike in traditional portrayals of the Virgin Mary, she's not wearing a red robe with a blue mantle, but a light red and orange dress with an elaborate border, reflecting Venetian fashion in around 1500. On her head, she sports a turban-like scarf and a translucent veil. The landscape behind her features a large body of water and a view of a city.

Originally, this was a larger painting, which included the baby Jesus; his left arm and foot can still be seen on the far left. However, the child was lost when the picture was later trimmed and reduced in size. 

What remained was Mary engaged in reading, an impressive, monumental figure. It is not unusual for the Virgin to be portrayed with a book in her hand. In the Roman Catholic Church, one of her devotional titles is "sedes sapientiae" – seat of divine wisdom. So the book is a common attribute. However, the fact that she's actively and intently reading this book is quite original.

So Carpaccio is showing Mary not just as a major figure of religious devotion. He dresses her in the fashion of the day, has her sit within a landscape reminiscent of Veneto, and elevates her as a role model of female education and a culture of reading – an identification figure.

In fact, women are unusually prominent in Carpaccio's paintings. Their demeanour is more self-confident than in the works of other Venetian painters of the period. By choosing the world of women – confined as they are to devotional reading – as the subject of his paintings, Carpaccio may have been addressing women specifically in his works... as viewers and perhaps even as patrons.