Madonna and Child with Saints

This gold-ground panel was painted around 1375, a generation after the Black Death had emptied much of Florence, in the years when the city was steadily refitting its churches with new altarpieces. It shows the Virgin enthroned with the Child, flanked by standing saints, the kind of image a congregation would have prayed in front of during Mass. Everything that could be gilded is gold, from the background to the halos, and the saints are ranked by size and place rather than set in a real room, an older, deliberately unworldly way of picturing heaven that Florentine patrons still wanted at the end of the 14th century. It is thought to come from a church dedicated to San Miniato, the young martyr who is one of Florence's own patron saints, and it later passed into the Uffizi.