The altarpiece was commissioned by the Compagnia dei Laudesi, a lay confraternity devoted to the Virgin, to decorate the chapel they occupied in the transept of the newly built Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

[1] In the 16th century, the art historian Giorgio Vasari mistakenly attributed the Rucellai Madonna to Duccio's contemporary, Cimabue, in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Although the contract required Duccio to use costly, ultramarine blue, made from ground lapis lazuli, conservators restoring the panel in 1989 determined the pigment of the Virgin's robe to be the cheaper substitute, azurite.

The emphasis on grace and refinement seen in the Virgin's gown and stylized anatomy may reflect a familiarity with French Gothic art[8] (which is also suggested by the aspects of the later Maestà).

This tendentious and teleological conception of late medieval works as early instantiations of the naturalistic, volumetric, and spatial concerns of the quattrocento is, however, misleading at best, as it divorces those images from their proper historical contexts and selectively emphasizes stylistic qualities that resemble later artistic currents of which 13th-century painters would obviously been unaware.

Hence, Rucellai Madonna is often described as a naturalistic advance over primitive Italo-Byzantine stylization, a willful misreading of a gold-ground, highly stylized and ethereal image that has much more in common with Paleologan icons than with Masaccio.