Die mystische Vermählung des heiligen Franziskus

Saint Francis had renounced money and property, and here a painter turned that vow into a wedding. Three women rise into the sky above him: Poverty at the centre, barefoot in a patched grey-green robe, flanked by Chastity and Obedience, the three vows Francis took. Sassetta painted this around 1440 as one panel of a huge two-sided altarpiece for the friars of Borgo Sansepolcro, a commission that stretched over some seven years. He was among the last great painters of the Sienese Gothic, and it shows in the elongated, courtly figures, the delicate colour, the toy castles dotting the hills with no concern for real distance. A young local painter named Piero della Francesca is thought to have studied this altarpiece where it once stood.