Retable of Cafaggiolo

Around 1454 Cosimo de' Medici, the banker who effectively ran Florence, had his family's country house at Cafaggiolo, up in the Mugello hills, rebuilt as a fortified villa. This panel was made for its chapel. The Virgin sits enthroned among eight saints, and two of them tell you whose chapel this was: Cosmas and Damian, the physician brothers the Medici took as their patrons, a nod to the name itself, which means doctors. At the foot of the throne lies a patterned carpet of the kind imported from Anatolia, a costly thing to own and a costlier thing to paint. The saints share a single space and a single light rather than standing in separate compartments, an arrangement Florentine painters were just then working out. The gold haloes are laid on thick, catching whatever light the chapel gave them.