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Nardo di Cione most likely painted this altarpiece for the most important church in Florence: the Duomo. The saints around the Virgin are Sts Zenobius, John the Baptist, Reparata and John the Evangelist.
The cathedral housed the relics of St Zenobius and the city's original patron saint, Reparata - both depicted here. Nardo painted the altarpiece in the wake of the Black Death, or bubonic plague, which struck Florence in 1348 and took the lives of two-thirds of the population. For their post-plague compositions, he and his contemporaries returned to a Gothic tradition, evident here in the use of gold grounds, the traditional manner of representing the changeless luminosity of the eternal.
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