Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saint John the Baptist, Saint Nicholas and Angels

Some time between 1405 and 1410, when Gherardo Starnina painted this small panel for someone's private prayers, Giotto's great Madonna for the Florentine church of Ognissanti was already about a century old. Starnina borrowed from it openly. The two angels holding up vases of lilies beside the Virgin come from that altarpiece, now in the Uffizi. Everything else belongs to his own day. Mary sits on a bank of cloud, ringed by the winged heads of seraphim, a Virgin of Humility lifted into heaven as its queen. Below kneel John the Baptist in a red cloak and Saint Nicholas, a bishop in a heavy gold cope, holding the three golden balls of his legend, on a floor of bright patterned tiles. Behind the heads of the flower-bearing angels you can still make out the marks left by the capitals of the lost original frame.