Saint Anthony of Padua Reading
Details
The story
Saint Anthony of Padua, the Franciscan preacher, stands barefoot in his grey habit on a gold ground, reading. Cosmè Tura painted him sometime between 1450 and 1475 as one panel of a polyptych whose other panels were later scattered.
What helps put them back together is something Tura never saw. In the 16th or 17th century somebody backed this rectangular panel and filled the bare corners above the arched gold with a painted surround, two small figures painted in monochrome in the spandrels and ornament running down the sides. The same surround appears on a Saint James in the museum in Caen and on a Saint Dominic in the Uffizi in Florence, cut off above the knees, so the three must have stood together in one frame. Some scholars add a Saint Sebastian and a Saint Christopher now in Berlin.
This panel belonged to the Marquis Campana in Rome, and it came to Paris after his bankruptcy, bought in 1861 for the museum of Napoleon III.
