Gentile da Fabriano, or Gentile di Niccolò di Giovanni di Massio (c. 1370 – c. 1427) was an Italian painter known for his participation in the International Gothic style. Gentile was born in or near Fabriano, near Ancona in the Marche. His mother died some time before 1380 and his father, Niccolò di Giovanni Massi, took monastic vows in the monastery of Santa Caterina in Castelvecchio, a fact that suggests that Gentile was fully independent, including financially, by that time. His father died in 1385.
Along with Ghiberti, Gentile da Fabriano was Italy's outstanding representative of the International Gothic style. He also contributed to the advanced art that foreshadowed the birth of the Renaissance. Gentile's paintings feature deep, vibrant colors, richly patterned surfaces, and people with soft, full faces, heavy-lidded eyes, and dreamy expressions. His lyrical atmosphere, elegant refinement, and attention to detail in rendering landscapes, animals, and costume typify the International Gothic style, originally developed in French and Burgundian courts and used especially in illuminated manuscripts.
Gentile worked in various places in central Italy, mostly in Tuscany. His best known works are his Adoration of the Magi (1423) and Flight into Egypt.

By 1408 Gentile da Fabriano was working in Venice. He must have been by then a well-known master, since he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece ordered by Francesco Amadi for the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Probably between 1409 and 1411 he was awarded an especially prestigious commission: to contribute to the fresco decoration of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale. Sources speak admiringly of his Battle of the Venetians against Barbarossa, destroyed along with everything else in the hall in the fire of 1577. By the 1420s he was working in Florence, where he painted his famous altarpiece depicting the Adoration of the Magi (1423), now in the Uffizi and regarded as one of the masterpieces of the International Gothic style.

In 1425 he left Florence for Siena and Orvieto (where he painted his fresco of the Madonna and Child in the Cathedral) before arriving in Rome. In Siena, he left a profound influence on Sassetta. He died in 1427 while working on frescoes in the Basilica of St. John in Lateran. He is commonly said to have been buried in the church now called S. Francesca Romana in Florence, but his tomb vanished. there is evidence, however, that he may be buried in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome, the place of his death.

He left no works in the Marche, except possibly a Madonna and Child (of uncertain attribution) in the Duomo at Sant'Angelo in Vado, near Urbino. He also left one painting in Venice.

The works that can be assigned to this first phase of the artist's career — like the little Madonna and Two Saints (Museo Civico, Pavia), the Madonna and Two Saints with Donor for the church of San Niccolò or Santa Caterina in Fabriano (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), the Madonna Enthroned with Angel Musicians for San Domenico in Perugia (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Perugia), and the polyptych for the church of Valle Romita near Fabriano (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) — suggest that he was trained outside of Fabriano. Some think his training was in Lombardy, others in Venice, but it certainly ran parallel with the refined, up-to-date late Gothic figurative tradition of Giovannino de' Grassi, Michelino da Besozzo, Stefano da Verona, and the Lombard miniaturists of the tacuina sanitatis.Between 1414 and 1419 Gentile worked for Pandolfo Malatesta, signore of Brescia, where recently there have come to light some fragments of his frescoes in the chapel of the Palace of Broletto. In 1419 the painter asked Pandolfo for a safe-conduct for himself and his entourage to reach Rome. He stopped first in Fabriano, where he is documented in 1420, and in the fall of that year he rented a house in Florence, enrolled in the painters' guild in 1422, and resided in the district of Santa Trinità until 1425. In Fabriano (or perhaps in Florence, but on commissions originating in Fabriano) he painted a standard with the Coronation of the Virgin on the front (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), and Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata on the back (Fondazione Magnani in Traversetolo, near Parma). In 1423, for the sacristy of Santa Trinità in Florence, he painted his masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi (now Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence). Commissioned by Palla Strozzi, this brilliant narrative spectacle is rich with sentiment, psychological observation, and an unusually detailed description of nature. For the church of San Niccolò Oltrarno in Florence he painted five panels, probably part of a larger complex (today preserved, in ruinous state, in the storerooms of the Gallerie Fiorentine), and the polyptych for the high altar, formerly signed and dated 1425, currently divided among various collections (National Gallery, London, on deposit from the Royal Collections; Uffizi, Florence; Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome; National Gallery of Art, Washington).

In 1425 Gentile frescoed a Madonna and Child in the cathedral of Orvieto and then worked in Siena, where his contemporaries greatly admired his Madonna and Child with Saints for the Palazzo dei Notai, now lost. In 1427 he reached Rome, where he worked for Pope Martin V and other patrons, and painted the Madonna and Child now in the Museo Diocesano in Velletri. He died that year while working on a fresco cycle in San Giovanni in Laterano. According to the humanist Bartholomeus Facius, "when the famous painter Rogerius Gallicus [Rogier van der Weyden]... had visited... this same church of John the Baptist and had looked at [Gentile's fresco], he was taken with admiration... and heaping praise on him preferred him to the other Italian painters."