Museum of Fine Art; Venice, Italy.

 Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact name of the museum, but it was a fine arts museum in Venice.

I have SO many photos from this one of the paintings, along with pictures of the artist's names so I would remember them later, but my external hard drive is being weird and won't work on my laptop.

There were SO many beautiful pieces here, most of them were religious sorts and painted pre 1600s I believe. The layout was also organized so that where you started in the museum, it was the oldest paintings, and as you progress you can see the paintings and styles and mediums advance and grow and take on new forms.

The first paintings were the very old religious ones, with mostly flat figures, dominance in the painting influencing the actual size of the figures(There were many paintings of Mary, where if it was real, she would be a twenty foot tall giant with little monks running around her feet), and LOTS of gold flakes used in the paints. The first inspirations for future artists', most definitely.

It progressed from there to more realistically rendered religious subjects(Like in the two photos provided, stolen from my facebook before my harddrive was being difficult), going more into the sorts of paintings I'm interested in. Nice compositions, realistic styles, almost a story being told within many of the paintings. Even the grand halls the paintings were kept in added to the effect. Big, swooping ceilings, and there were several paintings hung up kittycorner to the wall/ceiling, or even ON the ceiling. I didn't think people hundreds of years ago could warp their canvases the way I saw there, but it was really, really neat. There was one painting I actually got a severe neck ache looking at, I stood looking at it for almost ten minutes, head craned back, because it was a large, circular painting attached to the ceiling. The painting was beautiful, made obviously with the intention of being on a ceiling, because it looked as if you were looking through a window into heaven. Warm colored cloudy landscape, with small laughing cherubs and angles looking through the frame. Beautiful.

I'm going to try and get my external to work at school, see if I can't get any of the artist's names at least...