Matteo di Giovanni

In the summer of 1480 an Ottoman army landed at Otranto, on the heel of Italy, took the town and put hundreds of its people to death. Over the next decade Matteo di Giovanni, one of the busiest painters in Siena, kept returning to the Massacre of the Innocents, the Gospel story of King Herod ordering the killing of the baby boys of Bethlehem. He designed it in 1481 for the inlaid marble floor of Siena Cathedral, painted a version dated 1482 for the church of Sant'Agostino, another for the Servite church in Siena, and one for Santa Caterina a Formiello in Naples, the church that received the relics of the Otranto dead. Historians link the series to that shock, though the paintings themselves do not name it.

Matteo came to Siena from Borgo Sansepolcro, the home town of the painter Piero della Francesca, and is first recorded there in 1452, in partnership with the painter Giovanni di Pietro. In the early 1460s he painted the saints Peter and Paul and the predella that framed Piero's Baptism of Christ on an altarpiece for Sansepolcro. The Baptism is now in London, and Matteo's panels stayed behind in the town museum.

The National Gallery also holds his Assumption of the Virgin, probably from 1474, the centre of an altarpiece for the church of Sant'Agostino in Asciano, a small town near Siena. It was found in the 19th century in a wood store at the monastery, and in it Saint Thomas stretches up to catch the girdle the Virgin lets fall as she rises.