Abraham

Lorenzo Monaco's Abraham, painted around 1408 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicts the patriarch of the Old Testament in the flowing robes and gold-ground setting characteristic of the International Gothic style at its most refined. Lorenzo Monaco was a Camaldolese monk at Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence, and his paintings served as objects of contemplation for both monastic and lay patrons. The precise, calligraphic drapery folds and the figure's graceful elongation reflect the northern influence of French and Burgundian illumination filtered through the Sienese tradition, creating the distinctive Florentine International Gothic manner that Lorenzo Monaco mastered and that the young Fra Angelico would inherit.

The figure is rendered in Lorenzo Monaco's flowing linear style with characteristic elongated proportions, the patriarch's aged features painted with sensitivity against a gold ground that suggests divine radiance.