It was the art historian Roberto Longhi (1928) who first noticed the personality of Master of Madonna Straus amongst the Florentine artists of the late fourteenth century in the circle of Lorenzo Monaco. The name derives from the painting Virgin and Child, donated by the American collector Percy Selden Straus (1876-1944) to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
He is a very elegant late Gothic painter, recognizable for the way he renders transparent and luminous complexions, vivid and enameled colors of the fabrics with zoomorphic motifs, and the volume of draperies.