Two Seated Angels Making Music

Gherardo Starnina was a Florentine painter trained in the workshop of Antonio Veneziano who spent years working in Spain at the Aragonese court before returning to Florence around 1400. His two seated angels making music are characteristic of the International Gothic moment when he returned to Tuscany — figures of sinuous grace, richly decorated with gold tooling, that show Spanish court culture filtering into his Florentine training. Angels as musicians were a common subject for altarpiece spandrels and side panels, allowing painters to display decorative skill without narrative demands.

Starnina's gold-tooled halos and the decorative patterns on the angels' robes demonstrate the influence of his Spanish years, where craft-intensive court art had trained his eye for surface richness. The figures' poses — one plucking, one bowing — are rendered with the refined linear elegance typical of his International Gothic moment.