The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors

Tommaso del Mazza's The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors, dated around 1400 and now in the National Gallery of Ireland, is a work by a Florentine painter active in the late Trecento and early Quattrocento whose career straddles the transition between the generation of Giovanni da Milano and the new approaches of the International Gothic. Del Mazza was associated with the workshop of the Master of the Straus Madonna and worked in the tradition of Orcagna and his followers. Donor panels of this type — saints presenting patrons to the Virgin — were a standard vehicle for private devotion and social identity in late medieval Italian art.

Del Mazza employs a gold ground with the late Florentine Gothic figure style: elongated forms, decorative drapery, and warm flesh tones modeled in the Trecento manner. The Virgin and Child occupy a hierarchical center while flanking saints and kneeling donors create a devotional symmetry. Haloes are elaborately tooled and gilded.