Virgin and Child

Jacopo del Casentino's Virgin and Child (c. 1340) at Yale represents the intimate devotional panel type that was the staple production of Florentine workshops in the mid-Trecento. Jacopo was a conservative painter who maintained the Giottesque idiom with a particular warmth and decorative charm that made his small devotional panels popular with private patrons. As a co-founder of the Compagnia di San Luca in 1339, Jacopo played an important role in the professionalization of the Florentine painting trade.

Painted in egg tempera with gold leaf on a small poplar panel, the Virgin and Child display Jacopo's characteristic sweetness of expression and careful miniaturist technique. The Madonna's blue mantle and the Child's delicate features are rendered with precise brushwork, set against a tooled gold ground with decorative punch-work haloes.