Christ Enthroned Adored by Angels

This gold-ground panel is the middle of something that no longer exists. It was the centre of an altarpiece, and the rest of it is scattered: one panel in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, one in the National Gallery in London, one in a private collection in Paris. Scholars who have tried to put the pieces back together think the altarpiece stood in the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, and they date it later than the museum does, closer to 1370 than to the 1360s the Brera label gives.

Christ sits as judge, holding an open book with the words Ego sum alpha et omega, I am the beginning and the end. Four angels kneel below him, each turned a different way, one of them almost with his back to us.

The panel surfaced on the English art market and was bought by the Milanese collector Carlo Fossetti, passed in 1940 to Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, and reached the Brera only in 1970.