Saint Anthony Abbot

Pietro Lorenzetti was, with his brother Ambrogio and their contemporary, Simone Martini, one of the three major Sienese painters who emerged in the wake of Duccio di Buoninsegna in the early decades of the 14th century. This panel was correctly associated by Volpi and Freuler with the Pietà, also set in a quatrefoil but at 61 centimetres somewhat wider in format and with similar bands of flanking decoration, in the Fondazione Lia, La Spezia (Volpi, no. 102). The latter was evidently the central element of a predella, while this panel was on the left side of this. Volpi, rather harshly, comments on the condition of the panel, suggesting that this explains a 'certa secchezza' (certain dryness) that might otherwise suggest the intervention of an assistant: he suggests that the two panels must have come from a major polyptych, hypothetically that dated 1329 which is recorded in the church of the Umiliati at Siena. Freuler proposed that the panels were the predella to an altarpiece of which the Madonna and Child in the J.G. Johnson Collection in the Philadelphia Art Museum was the central element: however, Strehlke, in his review of the Lugano exhibition, pointed out that as the grain of the panel is vertical this is questionable, and suggests the possibility that the two panels may have been 'part of a piece of sacristy furniture such as Memmo di Filippuccio's cupboard in Poggibonsi': the grain of the Lia panel is also vertical and Strehlke (2004) considers the two panels to postdate that at Philadelphia, which he dates circa 1320.