Madonna and Child with Saints

Around 1411 the painter we know as Fra Angelico was not yet a friar. He was Guido di Pietro, an apprentice in the Florentine workshop of Lorenzo Monaco, a Camaldolese monk who painted in a refined late Gothic manner. This small panel, only 43 centimetres tall, came out of that workshop, and it carries both names. Where the master's hand stops and the pupil's begins is the question it still raises. When the Prado in Madrid opened its Fra Angelico exhibition in 2019, it hung the panel in the very first room and labelled it as Fra Angelico working in Lorenzo Monaco's workshop, around 1411 to 1412. Mary sits enthroned with the Child among four saints, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and a monk in a white habit who may be Anthony Abbot or Romuald, the founder of Lorenzo's own Camaldolese order. In the gable above them Christ stands in his tomb as the Man of Sorrows, between the mourning Virgin and Saint John.