Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, Saint Peter, and Two Angels.

Rossello di Jacopo Franchi was a Florentine painter of the early Quattrocento, working in the transitional period between the late Gothic tradition of his teacher Lorenzo Monaco and the new Florentine Renaissance. His Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels, of around 1430, belongs to the wave of sacra conversazione panels that were transforming Florentine devotional painting in these decades, replacing the polyptych's rigid separation of figures in individual compartments with a unified spatial setting in which saints and Virgin exist together. Rossello di Jacopo Franchi maintained Lorenzo Monaco's elegant color and refined figure types while absorbing the new spatial thinking.

The compositional challenge of unifying Virgin, Child, Baptist, Peter, and two angels in a single pictorial space — rather than compartmentalizing them in polyptych format — required rethinking the relationship between figures. Rossello di Jacopo Franchi uses a throne or landscape setting to give the Virgin spatial authority while the attending figures relate to her through gesture and gaze.