Master of the Rebel Angels

Everything known about this painter comes from a single wooden board, 64 centimetres high, painted on both faces. One side shows the rebel angels thrown out of heaven, the other Saint Martin cutting his cloak for a beggar. The board was later sawn in two so that both faces could be seen, and the two paintings now hang side by side in the Louvre, on long-term loan from the Musée du Berry in Bourges. His name is simply borrowed from the more dramatic scene.

No document names him. The gold ground and the refined drawing place him in Siena in the second quarter of the 14th century, close to Simone Martini, the city's most admired painter, and to Lippo Memmi, Simone's brother-in-law and working partner. The Louvre still files the two paintings under the Memmi family, and scholars have argued for Lippo or for Simone himself without settling the question. One suggestion is that he was among the Sienese painters who followed Simone to the papal court at Avignon, in the south of France, around 1340.

No other picture has been given to him with any certainty, so a painter good enough to be confused with Siena's best is known to us through two scenes, each just 29 centimetres wide.