Saint Apollonia

On 4 October 1454 the Augustinian friars of Sansepolcro signed a contract with Piero della Francesca for a large altarpiece, and then they waited. His final payment arrived on 14 November 1469, 15 years later, by which time he had also been at work on the fresco cycle in Arezzo. This small panel of Saint Apollonia belonged to that altarpiece, probably set into one of the piers that framed the main figures. Around the 1550s the whole structure was broken up and the pieces went their separate ways. Scholars think it once held roughly 30 panels. Eight are known today, in Washington, New York, London, Lisbon and Milan, and in 2024 those eight were shown together in Milan for the first time in well over a century. Apollonia was a martyr in Alexandria whose teeth her persecutors broke, and she holds a pair of pincers with a tooth still gripped in them.