Enthroned Madonna with angels

This once-splendid painting has been reduced to little more than a larva—save in areas such as the flowering meadow and the two angels seated on the throne. A major conservation treatment was undertaken in 2005 in preparation for the exhibition on Gentile da Fabriano, at which time missing parts were reconstructed (for the previous condition of the picture, see figs. 1–3 above). The picture marks a turning point in the artist’s career: a mastery of figural construction and an effect of monumentality achieved through simplicity in the silhouette of the Madonna and Child and a richness in the rhythmic articulation of the drapery. So novel is this effect that a number of scholars have thought the picture a product of Gentile’s Florentine period (Grassi 1953, Bellosi 1966, Micheletti 1976, Brandi 1978), but it is now firmly established that it was painted in Venice (Christiansen 1982, De Marchi 1992): the Child was more or less repeated in a fresco from Santa Margherita, Treviso, that has been ascribed to the young Pisanello (Museo Civico L. Bailo, Santa Caterina exhibition center, Treviso) and there are clear echoes of the composition in a painting by Giambono in the Luzzetti collection, Florence. Underscoring the importance of the panel is the fact that it was almost certainly the center of a polyptych similar to Giambono’s altarpiece in Fano (that it was not simply a broader panel with figures of donors is indicated by remants of inscribed lines in the gesso ground marking the vertical edges of the composition). As in Giambono’s altarpiece, the Christ Child directs his gaze and blessing downward, to the left, while the Virgin looks in the opposite direction. We have notices of only two works by Gentile in Venice: a panel (“una Ancona”) commissioned by Francesco Amadi in 1408, and an altarpiece (“una palla”) for a chapel founded in 1406 by Francesco Sandei in the church of Santa Sofia. According to Sansovino (Venetia città nobilissima et singolare descritta in XIIII libri, Venice, 1581, p. 54b) the latter altarpiece included depictions of “San Paolo primo heremita” and “Santo Antonio” (it was dismantled in 1610). The Met’s Madonna and Child may be considered a plausible candidate for the center panel; we know nothing of its history prior to 1900. The robes of the angels seated on the throne are executed in a fashion identical to that of a Saint Peter (Berenson Collection, Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Settignano) which has now been conclusively shown to have come from the pilasters of the Santa Sofia altarpiece (see M. Ceriana and E. Daffra in Gentile da Fabriano and the Other Renaissance. Exh. cat., Spedale di Santa Maria del Buon Gesù, Fabriano. Milan, 2006, pp. 140–42). The figure scale is consistent with that of the only other panel with a plausible connection with the altarpiece—a Saint Paul the Hermit (private collection, San Francisco). The altarpiece to which The Met’s panel belonged must predate Gentile’s Valle Romita Polyptych (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), which was commissioned after 1405, while Gentile was in Venice, and installed in its convent outside Fabriano before 1412. The compositional idea of the Virgin sitting on a throne, on the upper surface of which plants grow—so that the Virgin is at once exalted and humble—and with singing angels in the meadow below was treated in an earlier altarpiece (Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia). It has been suggested that the stylistic advances in The Met’s picture are due to Gentile’s awareness of the art of the Lombard painter Michelino da Besozzo, who also worked in Venice. This would suggest a date of about 1410. [2011; adapted from Christiansen 2006]