Madonna and Child with Four Angels

This small gold-ground panel comes from the very start of Fra Angelico's career, around 1420, when he was a young Dominican friar painting near Florence, decades before the San Marco frescoes that would make his name. It is tempera on a poplar board, the colours bound with egg over burnished gold that would have glowed by candlelight on an altar or in a cell kept for private prayer. The Virgin holds the Christ child while four angels press in close around them. Two of the angels wear deep crimson, standing out warmly against all that gold, and every halo is tooled into the surface so the light catches it.