Master of the Straus Madonna

This name is a scholar's label. In 1933 the American art historian Richard Offner gathered about two dozen Florentine paintings that seemed to share one hand, and named their unknown author after a Madonna then in the New York collection of Percy S. Straus, a panel now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The painter worked in Florence roughly between 1385 and 1415, between the generation of Agnolo Gaddi, son of a pupil of Giotto, and that of the monk-painter Lorenzo Monaco, and his slender, pale figures are often seen as pointing toward the young Masolino.

Scholars have tried to give him a real name. The Accademia suggests Ambrogio di Baldese, a documented Florentine painter, others have proposed Cenni di Francesco, and the question remains open.

The Accademia's large Annunciation, more than two metres wide, is dated about 1395 to 1400 and still sits in its original frame, which carries the coats of arms of the Ridolfi and del Verre families. It came from the chapel of a hospital for lepers in the Ognissanti district of Florence.