Enlivened by delicate touches of gold, this sweet and beautifully detailed Nativity scene was painted by Sano di Pietro, one of the most important and prolific 15th century Sienese artists. Here, God the Father, surrounded by a choir of thirteen angels, looks down upon a simple wooden stable set before a hilly landscape that extends far into the distance, the soft pink outlines of a distant cityscape faintly visible on the horizon. In the stable, Mary and Joseph kneel before the Christ child who rests upon a pile of golden straw, as two onlooking animals stand nearby. The white dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, appears at center descending towards Christ within God’s golden rays. Towards the upper right, a fourteenth angel announces the birth of Christ to two shepherds, with their canine companion and a pen of sheep, who look up to the sky with astonished expressions.

Sano di Pietro was born in Siena in 1405. He is thought to have been apprenticed to Sassetta and was registered with the Guild in 1428. An early and important independent commission is his signed altarpiece of 1444 for the Gesuati church of San Girolamo (now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale Siena); and, in 1445, he signed a fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Palazzo Publico. His earliest works, prior to the mid-1440s, have been thought by some scholars to be identifiable with those grouped under the anonymous Osservanza Master.¹

When the present painting was in the collection of Fielding Lewis Marshall, a date of about 1450 had been proposed. In the 1988 catalogue of the seminal exhibition Painting in Renaissance Sienna, however, Keith Christiansen revised this suggested date by drawing comparisons among four thematically similar works by Sano: a predella panel of the Nativity in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (fig. 1), a small altarpiece fragment illustrating The Annunciation to the Shepherds in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena (fig. 2), one miniature of the Nativity in the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna (inv. no. 562) and another miniature in the Museo Diocesano in Pienza. Taking this entire group together, Christiansen proposed that all, though linked iconographically, were created over a sequence of time. He considered the small fragment in Siena to be the prototype of the group and dated it to circa 1450. The two miniatures followed next, dating to about 1460 or soon after. Next would be the predella in the Vatican, followed at the end by the present panel, a mature work dating to about 1465-1475.²

The original function of this small panel has also remained a point of discussion among scholars. While Christiansen suggested in his 1988 catalogue that the work may have originally been placed in a small chapel where it would have been admired for its “small but heartfelt piety,” Labuda in his 1990 exhibition catalogue suggested it more likely originally functioned as an object of private devotion in the home of a layperson or a religious figure.

1. In 2011, documentary evidence relating to an altarpiece of the Nativity of the Virgin at Asciano was published by Maria Falcone identifying its creator – the Master of the Osservanza – as the young Sano di Pietro; aee M. Falcone, “La giovinezza dorata di Sano di Pietro: un nuovo documento per la Natività della Vergine di Asciano,” in Prospettiva, 138.2010, 2011, pp. 28-48.

2. Christiansen 1988, pp. 166-167.