Madonna and Child with Saints

Giovanni di Paolo finished this altarpiece in 1445 for a chapel in the church of San Domenico in Siena, the Dominican house long tied to Saint Catherine of Siena. The chapel was dedicated to Saint Dominic, which is why he appears among the figures, together with Saint Thomas Aquinas, another Dominican, while Saints Peter and Paul stand closer to the enthroned Virgin and Child. The panel still carries its gold ground, tooled and burnished by hand in the way Sienese workshops had used for generations. The altarpiece did not stay whole. Its predella, the row of small scenes along the base, was later broken up, and two of those panels, the Creation of the world and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, far from the Madonna they were made to sit beneath.