Saint Nicholas of Bari

In December 1981 a sale at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris offered a gold-ground panel of a bishop saint from the collection of the writer Anatole France. The catalogue called it Venetian school, around 1500. The Louvre used its right of pre-emption and bought it, and the panel is now given to Sassetta and placed in the second quarter of the 15th century. The saint is Nicholas of Bari, in mitre and red cope, holding a fold of white cloth with gold in it, the usual sign of his best-known legend, the dowries he threw secretly into the house of a poor man with three daughters. The panel was a side wing of a polyptych and has been cut down on one side. A Saint Anthony Abbot in Siena, owned by the Monte dei Paschi bank, came from the same altarpiece. The scholar Machtelt Israëls has suggested that both survive from an altarpiece Sassetta painted for the Petroni chapel in the church of San Francesco in Siena, made according to the wishes of a woman named Francesca, the wife of Nicolaccio di Caterino di Petrone.