Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints by http://www.wikidata.org/.well-known/genid/13c008f125f1582600f001784bec52ec
This is "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints," a panel painting from around 1400 by an unknown Italian master, now in a museum collection. It is a fragment of a crime, an early Renaissance altarpiece that was deliberately sawed apart and sold piecemeal.
The composition still works as a devotional image: the Madonna holds the Child on a Gothic throne, flanked by saints in two tiers. But look closely at the edges of the foreground saints. The paint stops abruptly, and the figures are cropped. Saw marks, not a frame, define the borders. Two saints that once completed the symmetrical assembly are gone.
The cutting likely happened in the 19th century, when the art market discovered that selling fragments of a large altarpiece to different collectors could yield more profit than keeping it intact. The other panels surfaced over time in separate European and American museums. That we can identify them at all is thanks to matching wood grain, pigment analysis, and the shared decorative vocabulary of the throne.
The Madonna's hands remain the emotional center. In the fragment that survived, her protective gesture is the one thing the saw could not sever.
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Transcript
It looks like a complete devotional painting. But this panel was once much wider. Six saints are here, but two are missing. Sometime after 1400, the altarpiece was cut into pieces and sold. We know because the rest of it turned up in other museums. And because saw marks run right through these saints. One art dealer made more money selling fragments than the whole. She still holds him, in the piece that got away.