Mary Enthroned with the Child, Saint Nicolaus of Bari, Saint Catherine of Alexandria and a Donor

This is the first existing work of Gentile da Fabriano, Italy’s most celebrated painter of the early 15th century, whose career had been a long journey in the service of the greatest patrons of his time, from the Marche to Venice, from Lombardy to Umbria, and from Florence to Rome.
In this youthful work, Gentile affirms himself as a master: to a very organized overall composition (in the centre the Virgin and the Child, surrounded by two saints and the kneeling donor) responds an exceptional realism of detail, quite in the taste of the period, called the International Gothic style. In the foreground, the flowers from the meadow are neatly depicted (dominated as they are by the two large lilies before the throne of the Virgin, which symbolize the purity of the latter). They extend into the brocade of the mantle of the right female saint, who looks like a Gothic sculpture. One can identify her only at close range: the small broken wheel at the foot of the saint indicates that she is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was certainly martyrized with a much bigger wheel. The attitude in which she holds the palm of her martyrdom seems almost a projection of the way Gentile probably holds his delicate pencil (a delicacy also visible in the manner in which the Virgin carries Christ in her arms, obviously not afraid that he will fall!). But the most striking and charming details are undoubtedly the angel musicians who populate the two trees in the background: they are painted with transparent red lacquers, which give them an evanescent aspect (fig. left).
Compared to this world of fable, the kneeling donor is much more rigid: we have left the divine world to enter our world. Who is here represented? The monogram, which decorates the ring of the man, which one finds once again represented well in evidence at its knees, constitutes without any doubt the key to his identification.
Although proposals have been made, none has so far won unanimous support. What seems certain, however, is that the work was intended for the funeral chapel of this man; at the beginning of the 15th century, it was not usual yet to represent the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints in the same pictorial space – polyptychs were still mandatory. The definitive change of this type of representation, which was to be called sacra conversazione or Holy Conversation, was to happen in Florence in the mid-1430s, thanks to Fra Angelico – Gentile da Fabriano never saw a moment he anticipated with this work, since he died in Rome in 1427. Through him, the Italian Gothic civilization had shone with its last fires. NR