The Presentation in the Temple

In May 1423 Gentile da Fabriano signed his great Adoration of the Magi for the Strozzi family chapel in Santa Trinita. This was the right-hand scene of the three along its base. Its two neighbours, a Nativity and a Flight into Egypt, remain with it in the Uffizi. This panel was separated from them in 1812, when Vivant Denon, director of Napoleon's museum in Paris, picked it out at the city's Academy and had it sent to the Louvre, and it was not returned after the wars. In the Uffizi a modern copy now fills the gap. Gentile sets the temple as an open, many-sided pavilion in a street of pink and grey houses. On the left two fashionable women look on, one crowned with a gold headdress. On the right a crouching man and an old woman leaning on a stick, both in rags, wait at the edge.