This elegant panel from the first quarter of the fifteenth century depicts the Virgin and Child with two attendant saints. The painting is one of the few at the Frick that has survived in its original frame, on the base of which, is the signature, in very small capital letters, of the itinerant artist Gentile da Fabriano.
The figures are painted in tempera over a gold ground that has been worked with tools to create patterns in the borders of the garments—around the Virgin’s robe, for example, and in the halo and clothing of the Christ Child, who plays with a little bird on a string. On the left is St. Lawrence, the third-century Roman deacon and martyr, who kneels beside the gridiron on which he was roasted. This was the punishment inflicted upon him for presenting the poor and the sick after the pagan prefect of Rome commanded him to hand over the treasures of the church. On the right is St. Julian, who built a refuge for travelers to atone for unwittingly killing his parents. He did not die a martyr, yet he is shown with the palm of martyrdom.
The painting probably originally decorated a small altar in a church or possibly, given its scale, in a private family chapel. The faces of the saints may be portraits of the panel’s patrons.
Virgin and Child, with Saints Lawrence and Julian
This small but richly painted altarpiece was designed perhaps for some private family chapel. It must be close in date to Gentile’s best-known work, the Adoration of the Magi of 1423, now in the Uffizi. Like the Adoration, this panel, with its lyrical linear patterns and elegantly ornamented surface, perpetuates late Gothic traditions, most obviously in the gentle, graceful figures of the Madonna and Child. The adoring saints, however, seem more advanced than work of the same date by Gentile's Florentine contemporaries; the portrait-like heads and solidly modeled bodies are strikingly natural and eloquent. Saint Lawrence, the third-century Roman deacon, kneels at left beside the grate on which he was burned alive. At right is Saint Julian the Hospitaler, who built a refuge for travelers in penance for unwittingly murdering his parents.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Albert, Duc de Broglie, 1846 [1821–1901; and subsequent heirs]; Frick, 1966.
Source: The Frick Collection: Drawings, Prints and Later Aquisitions. Volume IX. New York: The Frick Collection, 2003.
