polittico della madonna col bambino

Antonio de Carro was a lesser-known painter active in northern Italy at the very end of the fourteenth century, when the International Gothic style was beginning to transform Italian panel painting. This polyptych of the Madonna and Child, now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, reflects the continued demand for traditional multi-panel altarpieces in smaller Italian churches and chapels. The work documents the persistence of Trecento workshop traditions even as artistic innovation accelerated in major centers.

The polyptych is executed in tempera on gold ground panels with Gothic pointed-arch framing elements. The figural style is conservative, maintaining mid-Trecento conventions of frontal Madonna presentation with flanking saints in separate compartments.