A precious Renaissance painting of Mary with the Child by Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio shines in the Koper Cathedral fresh in all its glory, following a five-year restoration project.

Mary with the Child on the Throne and the Six Saints depicts Mary seated on a throne with a child and surrounded by saints Hieronymus, Joseph, Roch, Sebastian, Quirizio and Nazarius, the patron saint of Koper, holding a model of the city in his left hand.

The painting, created by Carpaccio during his time in Koper, presumably in 1516, has been returned to the side altar of St Roch and unveiled to the public on 11 October.

Measuring four by two and a half metres, the canvas was restored by experts at the Ljubljana Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage who spent 18,000 to 20,000 hours working on the painting.

The head of the project, Barbka Gosar Hirci, says the painting represents the culmination of a sequence of altarpieces and is very different in composition from all Carpaccio's previous altar images.

The institute started working on the painting in 2019, having previously restored two other works by Carpaccio from the cathedral, the Massacre of the Innocents and Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which were originally part of the organ case.

Having removed the altar painting from the cathedral in January 2019, they initially only observed it and made notes before they started removing surface dirt and the non-original layers of varnish.

Once the saturation on the front side was completed after a year and a half, both sides of the painting were reinforced and the painting's support was repaired. Once it was stretched onto the new sub-frame, the retouching work that had been under way for the past few years started.

Gosar Hirci and her colleagues Emina Frljak Gašparović and Sanela Hodžić spent more than a year on the final retouching alone. They were surprised by the old and completely dark retouches they found under the overpaintings of the Italian painter Cosroe Dusi, who had overpainted 70% of the painting in 1839. The retouches were removed by millimetres.

Mary with the Child and Six Saints is ahistoric and depicts the Virgin on a throne with angels musicians sitting by her feet and six saints, which are placed symmetrically on both sides.

From left to right they are Hieronymus, wearing a cardinal coat, Joseph, Roch, Sebastian and Nazarius. The last saint in the right foreground is Quirizio or Quirino, a Roman soldier identified by pastoral visitation in 1660.

Carpaccio (1465-1525/1526) was born in Venice and various historical sources indicate that he was a student of Venetian painter Gentile Bellini. He spent the last decade of his life in Koper, where he made the painting before he died in 1525 or 1526.

He was known to prepare for his paintings with sketches and studies. Gosar Hirci said that they examined the painting using UV photography and infrared light, which revealed a beautiful drawing on a white surface beneath the painting.