Madonna and Child Enthroned with Eight Angels

Pietro Lorenzetti signed this one. Along the step of the great marble throne he painted his name and a date, and though the inscription has been repaired so many times that letters have dropped out, it is usually read as 1340, which places the panel late in his working life.

It was made for the church of San Francesco in Pistoia, a town west of Florence, and shows the Virgin enthroned in majesty with the Christ Child, eight angels gathered close around them. The throne is the frame of the whole thing, heavy and squarely frontal, a piece of built architecture that fixes where everyone stands.

Against all that stone weight, look at the two faces. The Child has reached up to touch his mother's cheek and taken hold of her fingers, and she looks back at him. It is the kind of ordinary closeness between a mother and a small child that Sienese painters were learning to put into a sacred image, warmth folded into the older language of gold and majesty.

The panel came to the Uffizi in 1815.