Saint Dominic; and Christ Blessing

These panels, which once formed part of a predella, are by Benvenuto di Giovanni, one of the foremost artists in Siena in the late fifteenth century. The predella originally comprised seven three-quarter-length figures, six of which were acquired by Robert Lehman in 1920 and later dispersed. The present works depict Saint Dominic and Christ Blessing, while a panel of Saint Bernardino of Siena is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of Saint Peter Martyr is in the Yale University Art Gallery, and another of Saint Francis is in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. The last panel, thought to represent Saint Anthony of Padua, remains untraced. Carolyn Wilson (op. cit., 1996, p. 183) hypothesized the missing panel may have depicted Saint Thomas Aquinas or Catherine of Siena and reconstructed the predella's layout, placing Christ at the center, flanked by Saints Dominic and Francis, with Saints Bernardino and Anthony at either end and Saint Peter Martyr on the far right (ibid.)

Berenson (op. cit., 1932) first identified these panels as by Benvenuto di Giovanni in 1932, an attribution supported by Van Marle and, subsequently Fredericksen and Davisson (op. cit., 1972 ), who proposed a date of circa 1474. Maria Cristina Bandera (op. cit., 1974) later observed that the punch-marks for these works were comparable with the artist’s six pilaster panels from the Kress Collection (three in the Isaac Delgado Museum, New Orleans; and three in the Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg), the only other works in Benvenuto’s oeuvre to use this technique.