A Florentine tabernacle by Nanni di Bartolo and Giovanni di Francesco Toscani

In 1908, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired an extraordinary Florentine tabernacle from the collection of the Berlin art historian and curator Wilhelm von Bode. Typologically speaking, the tabernacle is a colmo da camera: a small aedicule containing an image, painted or sculpted, of the Madonna and Child. Inventories show that colmi were common in early fifteenth-century Florence, often installed in the bedrooms of palaces where they functioned as a focal point for daily prayer and devotion. The Met’s colmo has never been studied at length, but it is of exceptional quality and historical interest as the result of a collaboration between two of the most important artists of the period: sculptor Nanni di Bartolo and painter Giovanni di Francesco Toscani