Presentation at the Temple

Ambrogio Lorenzetti signed and dated this panel 1342, and painted it for one of the five transept altars of Siena's cathedral, part of a cycle on the life of the Virgin shared out among the city's leading painters. What he did with the setting was unusual for the moment. Instead of a flat gold ground he built a real temple you can walk your eye into, a marble floor whose lines pull back toward the columns, an interior and exterior shown at once. Look for the small human touches he loved: the earrings on the women, the infant Christ sucking his thumb. Six years after he finished it, the plague that swept Europe reached Siena and killed him.