Madonna and Child with Angels, St. Peter, St. John The Baptist, St. Paul and St. Francis: The Story of the founding of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome

On the 25th of March 1430 a wealthy Sienese widow, Ludovica Bertini, hired Sassetta to paint an altarpiece for a chapel in Siena Cathedral. It took him more than two years. The subject was an old Roman legend: one August night in the 4th century, snow was said to have fallen on a Roman hill in the summer heat, marking out the ground where the church of Santa Maria Maggiore should rise. Sassetta tells that story in the small scenes along the base, the predella, while above the Madonna sits among her saints on the glowing gold of Sienese Gothic. The panels later passed into private hands and now hang in the Uffizi, in the collection assembled by the antiquarian Alessandro Contini Bonacossi.