Anbetung des Kindes

Gentile painted this small panel around 1420, in the short gap between a visit to his home town of Fabriano and his arrival in Florence, where the next year he would deliver the huge, gold-drenched Adoration of the Magi that made his name. Here he is working smaller and quieter. He folds three separate moments of the Christmas story into one image. The Virgin sits directly on the ground rather than a throne, worshipping the child in her lap, an old idea called the Madonna of Humility. Around her he keeps the plain furniture of the story, Joseph asleep on the left, the ox and donkey in their stable on the right. And off in the dark distance the shepherds are getting the news, a stretch of real night landscape at a time when most painters still filled that space with flat gold.