Sano di Pietro Siena 1405-1481

Gian Giulio Rucellai, Florence, by 1960.

Siena, Oratorio di San Bernardino, Mostra bernardiniana nel V centenario della canonizzazione di S. Bernardino, May-October 1950, no. 70;
Florence, Mostra dei tesori segreti delle case fiorentine, 11 June-11 July 1960, no. 25, where lent by Gian Giulio Rucellai.

Mostra bernardiniana nel V centenario della canonizzazione di S. Bernardino, exh. cat., Siena, Oratorio di San Bernardino, May-October 1950, p. 80, cat. no. 70 (173);
G. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting, Florence 1952, col. 197, no. 53 C (II), reproduced col. 202, fig. 218;
Mostra dei tesori segreti delle case fiorentine, exh. cat., Florence, 11 June-11 July 1960, p. 17, cat. no. 25;
B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools, London 1968, vol. I, p. 376;
K. Christiansen, in Painting in Renaissance Siena 1420-1500, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 20 December 1988-19 March 1989, p. 164;
K. Christiansen, in La pittura senese del Rinascimento 1420-1500, (italian ed. of the above), Milan 1989, p. 178.

The event depicted in this panel took place on 22 May 1450, a week after Saint Bernardino's canonization by order of Pope Nicholas V (cfr. F. Amadio da Venezia, Vita di San Bernardino da Siena, Venice 1744, p. 192). It shows the paralitic donna Perna, wife of the Aquilean Matteo Petrucci, being cured after approaching the corpse of Saint Bernardino: his body was removed from its coffin by the people of Aquila and displayed in the church for veneration almost exactly six years after the saint's death in the Franciscan convent of Aquila on 20 May 1444. At the time of the exhibition in Siena (1950) and of Kaftal's publication two years later, the painting still constituted the right hand part of a larger predella panel (25 by 82 cm.), in which another posthumous miracle was also depicted (see Kaftal, under Literature, cat. no. 53 C (III), fig. 218, where it is reproduced alongside The rescue of 10-year-old Carinus after falling into the mill-pond whilst carrying grain to the mill). By the time of the exhibition in Florence in 1960 the predella had been divided into two, and a third panel, showing the Death of St. Bernardino (Kaftal, op. cit., fig. 216), was also in the Rucellai collection at this time.

These three panels clearly once belonged to the same predella as two others showing posthumous miracles associated with the saint: A drowned infant resuscitated by the saint and A possessed woman being exorcised (both in a private collection and reproduced in Christiansen, see Literature, p. 165, cat. nos. 24a and 24b): their dimensions are almost identical (circa 25 by 40 cm. each) and the figures are subsequently of similar scale; they all have the same tooling along their upright borders (the present panel only has tooling on the left hand side); and they all share a narrative simplicity which is entirely characteristic of Sano and which adopts the rather old-fashioned motif of showing the principal protagonist twice within the same picture field (this is true of all four panels illustrating the posthumous miracles). The scenes probably began with the Death of Saint Bernardino, the centralised viewpoint in the present panel indicates that it probably sat right in the centre of the predella, whilst the foreshortened architecture in the two panels in a private collection suggests their original placement was right of centre. It should perhaps be noted here that the chapel interior of the present panel is almost identical to that in A possessed woman being exorcised (though Sano has swapped the designs of the stained glass windows behind, presumably for decorative effect). The panels have been dated on grounds of style to the 1470s and Christiansen (op. cit., p. 164) has hypothesised that they once belonged to Sano di Pietro's altarpiece of The Madonna and Child enthroned with Angels, and Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Margaret, Francis and Bernardino (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena) though this is by no means certain. The theme of Bernardino's death and his posthumous miracles would perhaps have led one to expect a more central role for the saint in the main part of the altarpiece, but the choice of subject may have served simply to underline the significance of the saint's canonization. Indeed Sano di Pietro is known to have supplied the largest number of images of Saint Bernardino to various confraternities and Franciscan convents in and around Siena (including a processonal banner for the Compagnia that bears his name in 1467-69), and the predella to which this panel once belonged has been described as "the most extensive narrative cycle devoted to Saint Bernardino in fifteenth-century Sienese painting".