Workshop of Lorenzo Monaco

This entry is not a person. It stands for the label 'workshop of Lorenzo Monaco', which a museum uses when a panel follows the designs and manner of the Florentine monk-painter while the painting itself is judged to be largely by the assistants who worked with him.

In Florence around 1400 a successful painter rarely worked alone. The master settled the composition and often painted the heads himself, and assistants laid the gold leaf, ground the colours and carried whole passages forward. Lorenzo's late Gothic manner, with its long curving drapery and clear colour on gold, was in steady demand, above all for devotional panels that families kept at home for prayer. Separating his own brush from his assistants' is done panel by panel, on the quality of the drawing and the modelling, and scholars have moved pictures across that line in both directions. A panel filed under this heading has been judged to come from his shop and to follow his designs closely, without being given to him outright.