Predella Panel Representing the Legend of St. Stephen: The Stoning of St. Stephen / The Burial of St. Stephen

Mariotto di Nardo was a Florentine painter working in the late Trecento and early Quattrocento, a craftsman-painter of the Giotto tradition who produced altarpieces and predella panels for Florentine churches and guilds. This predella panel depicting the stoning and burial of Saint Stephen, dated 1408, belongs to a period when Florentine painting was on the cusp of the transformation brought about by Brunelleschi's architectural revolution and Masaccio's discovery of perspective. Mariotto di Nardo worked in the older manner, but his narrative panels have an energetic directness in crowd scenes that suggests genuine observation.

The predella format — small narrative scenes at the base of a larger altarpiece — requires compressed storytelling. Mariotto di Nardo fits multiple figures into shallow pictorial space, the stoning crowd arranged in overlapping planes to suggest depth without perspective geometry. Gold highlights in the drapery maintain the Byzantine decorative tradition while the faces show increased naturalism.