Madonna with Child enthroned with two Angels

We don't know this painter's name. Scholars call him the Master of the Bigallo Crucifix, after a painted cross once kept in the Bigallo, a building beside the Florence baptistery. Everything given to him has been gathered by tracing one hand across several panels. He worked in Florence in the first half of the 1200s, a generation before Cimabue, when the city's painting still followed Byzantine models closely: a gold ground, a frontal Virgin on her throne, faces drawn in firm dark lines rather than soft shadow. Here Mary holds the Child while two angels lean in from the sides. It is among the earliest surviving images of its kind made in the city.