Coppo di Marcovaldo (c. 1225 – c. 1276) was an Italian painter active n Tuscany.

He is the best-known named Florentine artist of the generation preceding Cimabue. His one signed work, the Madonna del Bordone (1261), confirms, together with a few other paintings attributed to him, the growing importance of Florence as a centre for panel painting during the second half of the 13th century.

Madonna del Bordone, was done in Tempera on wood, signed and dated (1261), in the Chiesa dei Servi of Siena, where he was prisoner after the Battle of Montaperti to which he had taken part.

Coppo is said to have been captured at Montaperti and required to paint the Madonna del Bordone to secure his release. This would explain the employment of a Florentine artist in a Sienese church in the year following the Sienese victory at Montaperti, but the story, often cited as fact, is purely traditional. Discussions of Coppo’s painting within the context of the Servite Order, in whose church it stood, and of its conjectural political meaning (Corrie, Mina) point to specific circumstances that may have influenced the commissioning and appearance of the work.

Coppo’s Madonna, executed with great technical proficiency, combines motifs from Italy, Byzantium and northern Europe. The Virgin sits on a lyre-backed throne, her feet resting on a cushion raised on a footstool. The upper half of her body is seen frontally; she looks out at the spectator and supports the Child on her left arm. This iconography derives from the Byzantine Hodegetria icon type, but here the half-length Byzantine formula has been adapted for use in a full-length, enthroned Virgin.

The Child turns to his right, his right hand raised in blessing, his left hand holding a scroll. He sits on an elaborately folded white cloth, which the Virgin supports with her left hand, while holding his foot with her right. Two diminutive full-length angels hover in the gold background above the throne.

The throne-back, cushions and kerchief are meticulously patterned, while elaborate mordant gilding on the garments of the Virgin and Child picks out the angular outlines of major folds and the fall of drapery between them.

The heads were painted in the following year by a local artist, who added a sfumato style influenced by that of Duccio di Buoninsegna, but different from Coppo’s art. X-Ray analyses have shown the original heads to be characterized by Coppo’s typical, rather sketchy manner of painting.