The Nativity of the Virgin

Inside a closed and candle-lit bedchamber, the newborn Virgin Mary is bathed by two midwives while Saint Anne rests beneath a canopy, the scene framed by an ornate gold ground in the manner of Sienese painting around 1400. Andrea di Bartolo, son of the Sienese master Bartolo di Fredi and one of the most gifted practitioners of the International Gothic style, set the holy birth in a hushed, jewel-toned interior — the pale architecture, the richly patterned bed-hangings and the tender gestures of the women rendered with a miniaturist’s delicacy that recalls the art of the illuminated manuscript. The panel was part of a small altarpiece devoted to the life of the Virgin, and it shows the late-medieval Sienese gold-ground tradition at its last, luminous flowering, before the naturalism of the Renaissance reached the republic. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.