La coronación de la Virgen

Around 1420 Gentile da Fabriano was the most sought-after painter in Italy for exactly this kind of sumptuous, gold-drenched picture. This panel was not made to hang still on a wall. It was the front of a two-sided processional banner, carried through the streets of Fabriano by a religious confraternity on feast days, with Saint Francis receiving his wounds painted on the back, a panel now in Parma. On the front the Virgin is crowned Queen of Heaven, and Gentile has tooled and stamped the gold ground until it catches light like beaten metalwork, angels making music to either side. Carried aloft in a candlelit procession, the whole surface would have flickered and shone.