Abstract: Chapter Three considers whether or not Antonio di Francesco di Jacopo di Lapo steered the commission to Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei to fresco the ‘company chapel’. The terms ‘old’ and ‘new’ in company registers are analysed in an attempt to distinguish between different chapel spaces. The chapter shows how several sites and tituli were established over time and chapels with varying ease of access assumed different functions. Charting reconstruction work on the old hospital site against receipts in respect of the commission to Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei, a case is developed in support of the hypothesis that the artist was employed to fresco the old hospital chapel. This stimulates further speculation that the brief was to reflect contemporary decorations in the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala.

Keywords: the ‘old’ and the ‘new’; fresco work; company records and payments; iconography; hospital chapels; decorative schemes set in context.

There is now no trace of the fresco work that Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei is said to have started and then left unfinished in the company chapel of the Fraternita di Santa Maria degli Angeli e Compagnia di San Francesco. Despite suggestions by some that the project was never started, others (and for which there is indeed archival evidence) have accepted that Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei did indeed start on the project, although there has been no consensus so far about the chronology of the work, or where the frescoes were painted. Bettina Koeper not only accepts that Francesco di Bartolomeo initiated work in the company's chapel around the middle of the century, but suggests that it was finally completed some thirty years later. Drawing attention to the record published by Gaetano Milanesi in which reference was made to fresco work that was carried out in 1485 by Marco di Giovanni and his son Baldassare – ‘a dipignare in nella Compagnia della Vergine Maria di Veste Nera, la storia di Giuseppe di biancheggiato in nella forma stanno quelle dell’altra faccia della chiesa’ – Koeper appears to accept not only that the frescoes were produced for a different group of lay religious, but that the original scheme was intended to be in grisaille. In seeming contradiction, the early nineteenth-century historian Benedetto Spinelli referred to a ‘storia di Giuseppe’ that was painted in 1489 by ‘Maestro Marco’ and his son Baldassare on canvas.