Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints

The label calls this panel the work of an imitator of Giotto, and the reason lies in how it was painted. Florentine painters of Giotto's time worked on wooden panels in egg tempera, pigment bound with egg yolk, laid over a white gesso ground and gold leaf. The museum records this one as oil on panel, a technique that came into general use in Italy only in the 15th century, long after Giotto died in 1337.

So the Virgin and Child enthroned among four saints is a later hand's version of a 14th-century devotional picture, the kind of small panel made for private prayer. It is about 46 centimetres high, and the museum gives it no date and does not say when its painter worked.

It came to Boston in 1903, in the bequest of George Washington Wales, a Boston collector who had died in 1896.