Gentile da Fabriano

(ca. 1370-1427)

   Italian painter, generally regarded as the greatest Italian painter of the late-medieval style known as International Gothic. He worked mainly in Venice but also in Siena, Orvieto, Rome, and Florence. He seems to have been uninfluenced by the new Early Renaissance style being developed in Florence by Masaccio at the very time when Gentile was working there on his most famous painting, The Adoration of the Magi (1423). The glowing color, lavish draperies, and exquisitely fine detail of this work are reminiscent of the works of the Flemish school, though Gentile executed his painting, an altarpiece, on a monumental scale rather than in the form of manuscript illuminations typical of northern art at the same period. Jacopo Bellini, one of the founders of the distinctive Venetian Renaissance style, was his pupil.