Maesta

Maestà

... In the West, the image seems to have developed, based perhaps on Byzantine precedents such as the coin of Constantine's Empress Fausta, crowned and with their sons on her lap and on literary examples, such as Flavius Cresconius Corippus's celebration of Justin II's coronation in 565 ... Paintings depicting the Maestà came into the mainstream artistic repertory, especially in Rome, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, with an increased emphasis on the veneration of Mary ...