Works by Gentile da Fabriano

Gentile da Fabriano, a painter of the International Gothic, set holy figures against tooled gold yet painted the grass, flowers and cloth around them from close looking.

Among his first known works, the Berlin Madonna and Child with Saints Nicholas and Catherine puts a kneeling donor beside the bishop saint and fills two trees on the gold ground with small red angels. Gentile, from Fabriano in the Marche, worked at the Visconti court in Pavia around 1390, in Venice from about 1405, in Foligno and Brescia, and in Florence from 1420. He died in Rome in 1427, soon after Pope Martin V commissioned him to decorate the nave of St John Lateran.

Everything below is a religious painting, most of the dated ones from the 1420s. In the Coronation of the Virgin, of about 1420, Christ and Mary wear robes patterned in gold, and angels at both sides hold sheets of music. The gold border of Mary's cloak in Madonna and Child Enthroned carries the words of the Ave Maria. In the Getty Nativity, the Virgin sits on the ground praying over the child, who lies under a thin veil, while Joseph sleeps at the left.

Florence brought him into contact with humanism, and there he painted his Adoration of the Magi of 1423 for Palla Strozzi, using light to model figures and open up space. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, dated that year, sets the scene in a slender temple on a street of pink and white houses, with richly dressed women on one side and beggars on the other.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, J. Paul Getty Museum, Gemäldegalerie Berlin, National Gallery of Art, Louvre. Portrait: Giorgio Vasari.