Brooklyn Museum: Collections: European Art

Maso di Banco: Madonna and Child with Saints and Scenes of the Life of Christ

Maso di Banco (Italian, Florentine, active 1320–53). Madonna and Child with Saints and Scenes of the Life of Christ, circa 1336. Tempera and gold on panel; wings: 17 3/4 x 5 1/8 in. (45.1 x 13 cm); center panel 30 1/8 x 11 3/4 in. (76.5 x 29.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mary Babbott Ladd, Lydia Babbott Stokes, and Frank L. Babbott, Jr., in memory of their father, Frank L. Babbott, 34.838

Maso was one of the most gifted pupils and associates of Giotto (1267–1337). This triptych, intended for private devotion, is the only complete work of this size that can be attributed with certainty to his hand. Even at this scale, the figures have a Giottesque magnitude and solidity. Maso surrounds the central Madonna, enlarged and enthroned to emphasize her majesty, with a choir of twenty saints, whose number is implied by the neatly overlapping, tooled halos. This approach to representing depth, before the invention of perspective, reveals a simultaneous sophistication and naïveté. In a series of separate scenes, stacked one above the other on the wings of the triptych, the pictorial program recounts episodes of the Life of Christ, from the Annunciation to the Crucifixion.

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