Antonio de Carro

A single inscription is the reason this painter has a name at all. Along the base of a large altarpiece made for the convent of Santa Franca in Piacenza runs a line giving the year, 1398, and the man who painted it, Antonio de Carro. His birth and death years are documented nowhere. He can only be placed in Piacenza across the last years of the 14th century and the first of the 15th.

That altarpiece is the only work securely his, and it has been in Paris since 1905, in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The Virgin and Child hold the centre with the monk who paid for it kneeling at her feet, three saints stand on either side, a Crucifixion sits above, and prophets fill the gables. It counts among the strongest Lombard examples of the International Gothic, the ornate court style that spread across Europe around 1400, and specialists have noticed Venetian habits in the handling.

The panel of Saint Lawrence in Bucharest, dated 1421, is given to him on attribution, without a signature, which is how the whole small group of works around his name has been assembled.