ABSTRACT
Undoubtedly one of the most intriguing problems in thirteenth-century Mediterranean art is presented by two images of the Virgin and Child Enthroned, now known as the Kahn and Mellon Madonnas (Plate 20, Fig. 24.1 and Fig. 24.2). The two panels surfaced together in 1912 at auction in Madrid and after passing through different private collections were reunited in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where they now hang side by side.1 Perhaps as much as any, these images stand between east and west in art history’s version of thirteenthcentury events and offer us an opportunity to explore the relationship between Byzantine and Italian images and painters. Published early on by Bernard Berenson, who called them Constantinopolitan, they have also been attributed variously to Venice, Sicily, Siena, Cyprus, and Thessaloniki.2 A tradition which added Calahorra, Spain, by way of Sicily, to their provenance has recently been discredited and so we are left with remarkably little information about their history.3
