Virgin and Child on the Throne

Virgin and Child on the Throne, at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, is a devotional panel by the Florentine artist Neri di Bicci, a prolific workshop master active in the mid-fifteenth century. Around 1450 Neri operated a highly productive bottega that supplied altarpieces and devotional panels to Florentine churches and private patrons, adapting the conventions established by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi for a broad market. The enthroned Madonna and Child is one of the most requested formats of Quattrocento devotional painting, and Neri's version is a competent example of the workshop tradition.

The Madonna is positioned on an architectural throne rendered in simplified perspective, her blue mantle painted in ultramarine over a warm ground. The Child's flesh tones are modeled in the established Florentine manner of egg tempera—layered passages of flesh-pink over a green earth underpaint—producing the characteristic luminosity of the period.