Saint John the Evangelist

This tall saint stood beside the Louvre's Virgin and Child on the front of the same altarpiece. Sassetta shows John the Evangelist as an old man with a white beard, a book in one hand and a pen in the other, as the author of his Gospel. The altarpiece was taken down from the high altar of San Francesco in Borgo Sansepolcro in the late 1570s or early 1580s. By 1584 the Virgin and the saints now in Paris were standing on two different altars of the church, and afterwards they were kept in the friary. Around 1808 they were sold to a gentleman of Arezzo, then passed to a canon of that city, to his brother, the prior of a monastery near Asciano, and to an owner in Florence. By 1900 they belonged to the Teyssonneau family in Bordeaux, and the Louvre bought them from their descendants in 1956.