Virgin and Child with Angels

Virgin and Child with Angels, painted around 1459 and held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, is among Pesellino's final works, made in the last year before his death. The format—the Virgin enthroned with angels—was among the most traditional in Florentine devotional painting, and Pesellino's late version of it shows his mature refinement of this subject applied to a composition he had clearly worked on many times throughout his career. The Kelvingrove's holding of this work documents Scottish institutional collecting of Italian Renaissance painting.

The enthroned Virgin with angels allowed Pesellino to deploy his most careful figure work in a hierarchical composition: the Virgin central and slightly elevated, the angels arranged symmetrically below and beside her. His late tempera handling is particularly refined, with subtle modelling of flesh and precise rendering of the individual angel faces.