Madonna col Bambino in trono e santi

In the 1480s Ghirlandaio ran the busiest painting workshop in Florence, the one a teenage Michelangelo would soon enter as an apprentice. This altarpiece was made for San Giusto alle Mura, a small church just outside the city walls. Look at the Turkish carpet on the steps of the throne and the glass vases of white lilies beside the Virgin. That patient attention to woven fabric and to light caught in glass came from Flemish paintings then arriving in Florentine collections, which local painters studied closely. Four saints stand in quiet conversation around the throne, among them Thomas Aquinas and Saint Dominic, both in the black and white of the Dominican order.