Description
Painted before 1320, these three panels by Pietro Lorenzetti depict a monastic saint holding a staff and book, identified by the Horne Museum as Saint Leonard, together with Saint Catherine of Alexandria and her wheel and Saint Margaret of Antioch holding a cross. Their shared gold grounds and delicately modelled figures reveal the refinement of early Sienese painting. Although united today within a Gothic-style frame, the arrangement is a later reconstruction. The panels once belonged to a polyptych associated with Monticchiello and are now in Florence.
The present display poses an important question: what changes when three panels are shown as a triptych although they were not originally designed as one? The nineteenth-century Gothic-style framework encourages visitors to see a balanced, frontal conversation between three saints. That arrangement, however, belongs to the later history of collecting.
