Madonna with Child and Two Angels

Gentile da Fabriano painted this small panel around 1410, probably during his years in Venice, in tempera and gold on a piece of fruitwood. Barely the size of a sheet of paper, it was made for private prayer, something its owner could keep close at home. The Madonna and Child sit against a ground of tooled gold and are flanked by two angels, in the soft, courtly manner known as International Gothic that spread across Europe around 1400. Gentile was among its finest hands, and a little over a decade later he would paint his crowded, glittering Adoration of the Magi in Florence. This panel first surfaces in modern records in a house in Belluno, north of Venice, which points back to those early Venetian years.