Madonna con Bambino

Gentile was one of the great travelling painters of his day, moving between Venice, the Marche and Umbria as commissions called, and this enthroned Madonna was made for the church of San Domenico in Perugia around 1405. It belongs to the courtly, gold-ground manner later called International Gothic, delicate, richly patterned, more interested in grace than in weight. At the foot of the throne a little group of angels play music. The dating is actually argued over. Some scholars find the solid, rounded body of the Christ child so advanced that they push the panel forward to Gentile's Florence years in the mid-1420s, when younger painters were reinventing how bodies sat in space. The tempera panel is now in the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia, the city it was painted for.