Madonna and Child

Gherardo Starnina was a Florentine, yet this Madonna carries something he picked up far from home. In the years before he painted it, around 1403, he had worked in Spain, in Toledo and Valencia, taking Florentine painting to Spanish patrons and absorbing their taste in return. Look at the Virgin's crown and the lyrical, slightly foreign grace of the whole panel, and you are seeing that Spanish detour come back to Florence. For a long time no one knew his name. Scholars called him the Master of the Lively Child, in Italian the Bambino Vispo, because his Christ Children tend to squirm and twist rather than sit still and bless. This wriggling infant is exactly the habit that earned him the nickname, before documents finally tied those paintings to a real Florentine who had built his reputation abroad.