Executed in the first half of the fifteenth century, this large and impressive devotional panel exudes the elegance, refinement, and grace that typified Florentine painting. The resonances with the devotional paintings of Fra Angelico, the city’s principal artist in the first half of the Quattrocento, are particularly compelling.

Roger Fry and Osvald Sirén first identified this anonymous Florentine hand in two near-contemporaneous articles of 1910 and 1914. The scholars independently assembled a body of work related to a desco da parto, or birth salver, depicting the Judgement of Paris in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello (fig. 1).¹ Since then, scholars have somet.mes s identified the artist as Cecchino da Verona.² The attribution of the present painting to the Master of the Judgement of Paris was first suggested by Federico Zeri.³

As is characteristic of the painter’s work, the elongated figures are defined through elegantly tapered limbs and their oval faces are rendered with a miniaturist’s delicacy. The ornate punchwork used to delineate the different halos is especially sophisticated and underscores the dual interest in surface decoration and emotional sensitivity that defines the artist’s body of work.

¹ R.E. Fry, “Letter to the Editor, Catalogue Raisonné de la collects ion Martin le Roy,” in Burlington Magazine 17 (April-September 1910), pp. 126-127; O. Sirén, “An Early Italian Picture in the Fogg Museum in Cambridge,” in Art in America 3 (1914), pp. 36-40.
² F. Zeri, “Inediti del supposto ‘Cecchino da Verona,’” in Paragone 2, no. 17 (1951), pp. 29-32.
³ Fondazione Federico Zeri, Fototeca no. 11465.