The 'Master of the Orcagnesque Madonna' was christened by Richard Offner in 1958 after a 'Madonna of Mercy with Augustinian Nuns' in the Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence (Boskovits, op. cit., fig.225) and his oeuvre has since been augmented by Marcucci, Zeri, Boskovits and others. While Offner stressed the Cionesque aspects of his style, identifying him as a pupil of Andrea di Cione, other scholars have considered his early work more Daddesque in character and his late style as parallel to, and superior to, early Agnolo Gaddi. In the opinion of Boskovits (idem, p.65), this rich development 'gli assicura un posto fra i protagonisti veri e propri della pittura fiorentina' and he suggests that he may be identifiable as Giovanni Gaddi (documented 1369-1385), son of Taddeo Gaddi and elder brother of Agnolo, who is known to have been an important painter but by whom no works have been identified.

The present panel is the centre part of a predella of which the flanking panels (each half as wide as the present picture) have been identified: 'Saint Catherine of Alexandria's Vision of the Christ Child' (see fig.a) is in the Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and 'The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria' (see fig.b) is in the Worcester Art Museum (idem, figs.208 and 207; Pope-Hennessy, op. cit., illustrated pp.65 and 283). There are no dated works by the master but Boskovits places the predella early in his development and suggests a date of 1360-5, although emphasizing that this dating must remain provisional due to the shortage of comparative material. Professor Sir John Pope-Hennessy has proposed, loc. cit., that the central panel of the main tier of the altarpiece may have been the 'Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria' in the Heinz Kisters Collection at Kreuzlingen (B. Berenson, Homeless Paintings of the Renaissance, 1969, fig.160; Boskovits, op.cit., fig.217)