Madonna and Child, with Saints Lawrence and Julian

This small but richly painted altarpiece was designed perhaps for some private family chapel. It must be close in date to Gentile’s best-known work, the Adoration of the Magi of 1423, now in the Uffizi. Like the Adoration, this panel, with its lyrical linear patterns and elegantly ornamented surface, perpetuates late Gothic traditions, most obviously in the gentle, graceful figures of the Madonna and Child. The adoring saints, however, seem more advanced than work of the same date by Gentile's Florentine contemporaries; the portrait-like heads and solidly modeled bodies are strikingly natural and eloquent. Saint Lawrence, the third-century Roman deacon, kneels at left beside the grate on which he was burned alive. At right is Saint Julian the Hospitaler, who built a refuge for travelers in penance for unwittingly murdering his parents.

Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.