Saint Lawrence

When religious houses were suppressed across Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries, their old altarpieces were taken apart and the compartments sold one at a time, and a Gothic panel moved more easily once its pointed top had been sawn into a neat rectangle. That is what happened to this Saint Lawrence, trimmed at the top and at the bottom. His eyes give away where he once stood. They turn to the right, toward the Virgin who would have held the centre of the altarpiece, which makes him a left-hand compartment of a work no one has managed to identify. Bernardo Daddi painted him around 1340, in his last years, and a restoration much later confirmed his hand after scholars had doubted it. The panel came to Brera in 1903 as a gift from the collector Casimiro Sipriot.