Group of Fifteen Standing Figures

In the numbering of the Campana collection, the huge Roman collection the papal government sold to France in 1861, two Signorelli panels stand side by side. Number 245 is a large altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, painted in the early 1490s for the high altar of Sant'Agostino in Città di Castello. Number 246 is this, a crowd of men cut off on every side, a little over a metre high.

There are 15 figures packed into it, in turbans, a helmet, red caps, striped sleeves and white gloves. In 2001 the American scholar Laurence Kanter connected the fragment with that Adoration, which is also in the Louvre, and the museum's record cites his view. The Louvre dates the panel itself only to the last quarter of the 15th century.

Both entered the Louvre in 1863. The Adoration became MI 540 and this panel MI 541, so the two neighbours in Campana's list are still neighbours in the Louvre's inventory.