Gentile da Fabriano

Italian (Umbrian), c. 1370-1427

BiographyGentile da Fabriano, aka Gentile di Niccolo Massio, (c. 1370 – 1427) was an Italian painter known for his participation in the International Gothic style. He worked in various places in central Italy, mostly in Tuscany. His best-known works are his Adoration of the Magi (1423) and the Flight into Egypt.

Gentile was born in or near Fabriano, in the Marche. His mother died some time before 1380, and his father, Niccolò di Giovanni Massi, retired to a monastery in the same year.
By around 1405, Gentile da Fabriano was working in Venice painting church panels and frescos, now lost.

From 1410–1412 is one of his first masterworks, the Valle Romita Polyptych (now at the Pinacoteca di Brera). In 1410–1411 he was at Foligno, where he frescoed the Palazzo Trinci. In 1414 he moved to Brescia, at the service of Pandolfo III Malatesta, and painted the Broletto Chapel, a work now mostly lost. In the Spring 1420 he was again in Frabriano.

On 6 August 1420 he was in Florence, where he painted his famous altarpiece depicting the Adoration of the Magi (1423), now in the Uffizi. His other works in Florence include the Quaratesi Polyptych (May 1425). In June–August 1425 he was in Siena, where he painted a Madonna with Child, now lost, for the Palazzo dei Notai on Piazza del Campo. Until October he was in Orvieto, where he painted his fresco of the Madonna and Child in the Cathedral. In 1427 he arrived in Rome, commissioned by Pope Martin V the decoration of the nave of the Basilica of St. John in Lateran, which was completed by Pisanello after his death.

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