Madonna and Child

In 1433 Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar in Florence taking on the biggest commission of his life so far, the linen guild's tabernacle, whose marble frame Lorenzo Ghiberti himself designed. Around that large work he also painted small panels of the Virgin and Child, not for a church wall but for someone's room, to be kept close during prayer. This is one of those. He still lays down a gold ground in the old devotional way, yet the figures already carry the new weight that Masaccio and the sculptor Donatello had just brought to Florentine art, so the Child sits with real solidity in his mother's arms instead of floating against the gold. Angelico was a friar first and a painter second, and Vasari later wrote that he never took up a brush without praying, and wept as he painted the Crucifixion. The panel now hangs in Berlin, among the sculptures of the Bode Museum.