Saint Paul

This Saint Paul was painted to be seen from below. He sits on a bank of cloud against a flat gold ground and turns his eyes upward, his heavy robes spilling toward the viewer. Scholars have offered two explanations for the format. One is that this canvas and its companion, a Saint Peter on the same gold ground now given to a different painter, served as the doors of an organ. The other, which the museum currently finds more credible, is that both were models for craftsmen to translate into mosaic. The picture is dated to the early 1550s and attributed, with the question still debated, to Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta. In one hand Paul holds a folded sheet, a reference to his letters, and there is no sword, the attribute he usually carries.