Abstract: Chapter Two considers the production of the new altarpiece commissioned from Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro early in 1444. Attempting to explain the delay between its completion in April 1446 and its delivery eighteen months later, it is suggested that the death of Antonio di Francesco di Jacopo di Lapo some time before December 1445 led to the altarpiece being displayed on a different site than that originally intended (the company's upper-floor ‘church’ rather than the old ground-floor hospital chapel). Confraternal decorations and furnishings recorded in an inventory of the fraternity's ‘church’ in 1452 offers support for the hypothesis that changes were made after that sponsor's death: as does the altarpiece's recorded iconography, which included references to the sponsor and a number of Franciscan lay religious (including the Beato Pietro Pettinaio).

Keywords: Giovanni di Paolo; Sano di Pietro; Antonio di Francesco di Jacopo Lapo; conventual space; iconography; pilgrimage sites.

Previous Analysis and Documentary Evidence

In their 1985 article on the ‘Maestro dell’Osservanza’, Cecilia Alessi and Piero Scapecchi referred to an altarpiece that was commissioned around 1450 from Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro for a confraternity assembling under the titulus Compagnia di San Francesco. The same authors suggested that while Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro were working on that altarpiece, Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei was working alongside them, engaged on the same site, frescoing the confraternity's ‘chapel’. Surviving records from the archive of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala (which were published by Peleo Bacci in 1941) confirm that a new altarpiece was indeed being painted by Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro around the fifth decade of the fifteenth century (specifically, for the ‘Chompangnia e Fraternita di San Franciescho posta nel Chonvento di San Franciescho’). Bettina Koeper also pointed out that the altarpiece referred to in the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala archive was the same altarpiece that Émile Gaillard had identified in 1923, as produced for the ‘Compagnia di San Bernardino’ between the summer of 1444 and 1447. Against this background, the chronology suggested by Alessi and Scapecchi seems questionable. In fact, I can now show that the project to produce a new altarpiece for the Fraternita di Santa Maria degli Angeli e Compagnia di San Francesco was already in hand by January 1443/4: there being references at that date to the preparation of the altarpiece's woodwork.