Sixteenth-century sources record that this panel was originally used as a predella beneath Donatello's Annunciation in the Cavalcanti Chapel of the church of Santa Croce in Florence: in fact it fits perfectly between the two brackets that support Donatello's sculpture. Three scenes from the life of St. Nicholas of Bari are painted on a single horizontal board. The choice of saint suggests that the man who ordered the painting was the same Niccolò Cavalcanti who had commissioned the Annunciation from Donatello. But the latter dates from the beginning of the 1430s, while Giovanni di Francesco's predella has been dated to somewhere around the second half of the 145Os. For some time now the work has been seen as paradigmatic of a particular stage in the development of perspective in the fifteenth century: it is not just the painter's masterpiece, but also "one of the finest products of the Florentine Quattrocento", as it is described in an old editorial written by Roberto Longhi.

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