Three Saints

Nardo di Cione, brother of the celebrated Andrea Orcagna, was a leading Florentine painter of the mid-Trecento whose major surviving work is the fresco cycle in the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella. This Three Saints panel of around 1365, now in the National Gallery, London, likely served as a lateral section of a polyptych altarpiece. Nardo's work bridges the monumental gravitas of Giotto's legacy with the more refined decorative sensibility of the late Gothic period.

Painted in egg tempera on gold-ground panel, the three standing saints are rendered with Nardo's characteristic soft modeling, elongated proportions, and delicately tooled haloes that distinguish his hand from the harder linearity of his brother Andrea.