Saint Andrew (?)

This panel is less than 20 centimetres across, cut as an octagon, and shows a bearded saint holding a book. The museum calls him Saint Andrew but adds a question mark, and scholars have also described him simply as a bearded saint with a book. He probably sat in a row of apostles along a predella, the strip of small pictures at the foot of an altarpiece. One proposal puts him beneath the polyptych Simone Martini painted in the early 1320s for the high altar of San Domenico in Orvieto, ordered by Trasmondo Monaldeschi, bishop of Sovana, for 100 florins. A second octagon by Simone, a young beardless saint with a book now in Birmingham, would have come from the same row. That altarpiece was carried off to Paris in the Napoleonic years and came back to Italy around 1815, and it was probably taken apart about then. An inventory made in Rome in 1850 lists three octagons of apostles in the manner of Simone, and this may be one of them. The museum singles out the fine curls of the hair and beard and the gold edge of his robe, which runs in a lively, snaking line.