In contrast to the vast majority of paintings collected by Percy S. Straus, these two panels are not in the pristine condition on which he usually insisted, but are quite abraded. Straus acquired the panels as works from the hand of Lorenzo Monaco, one of the most important Florentine painters at that critical transitional period between the end of the trecento and early quattrocento, when late medieval representation ceded to the new concepts of the Renaissance. However, his discerning eye would probably have told him that the attribution to the master himself would be difficult to uphold because of the condition issues.

The artist, born Piero di Giovanni, changed his name upon entering the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli of Florence in 1390. Known as Don Lorenzo to his contemporaries, he continued to work as a painter, yet little is known of his sparsely documented life beyond the confines of his monastic life.¹ Among the documents are a few commissions for altarpieces, the gift of a house with a garden outside the monastery to be used as his residence and workshop, and a small number of other transactions. His workshop seems to have been so large and successful that only a few of his works have been attributed to his hand alone. Only a single altarpiece—that for Santa Maria degli Angeli, the church of his monastery—is signed. According to Marvin Eisenberg, it is his most “comprehensive and spectacular” work, but even here, the signature indicates a collaboration with assistants.² Many other works, such as these panels, have been attributed by scholars to either anonymous members of his workshop or to followers not associated directly with it.³

Percy Straus may have been persuaded to make this acquisition by the decorative quality of the Gothic-style tabernacle onto which the panels were mounted as doors (fig. 9.1).⁴ Small, three-dimensional shrines such as this one were popular in early fifteenth-century Florence, but determining the date and authenticity of this tabernacle has remained inconclusive.⁵ When opened, the panels display Saint Michael and Saint Francis in the lower, main part of the panels. The angel Gabriel in the rounded-off apex on the left greets the Annunciate Madonna in the apex of the right panel, across the opening of the little shrine, which would probably have held a sculpture of the Madonna and Child. Stylistically, the panels are close to Don Lorenzo’s polyptych of the Annunciation with Saints Catherine, Anthony Abbot, Proculus, and Francis of Assisi in the Galleria della Accademia, Florence (fig. 9.2). As Carolyn Wilson points out, the figures of the saints share certain physiological characteristics, as well as their exaggerated stances, the internal pattern of their contours, and an overall delicate coloring.⁶ Eisenberg sees the marked similarities between the figures of Saint Francis of the polyptych and the Straus panel as evidence of the working method of a pasticheur, who also copied the figure of the Annunciate Madonna from Lorenzo Monaco’s Monte Oliveto altarpiece. However, for the figures of Saint Michael and the angel Gabriel, depicted on the left panel, there are no direct models to be found in the altarpieces produced by Don Lorenzo and his workshop.⁷

—Helga Kessler Aurisch