Saint Veranus between Two Angels and Six Stories from His Legend

The bishop in the middle is Veranus of Cavaillon, a 6th-century saint from Provence, and the reason a Tuscan parish wanted his picture is that the church at Peccioli, in the hills south of Pisa, was dedicated to him. That church is documented by 1171. The panel came later, in the third quarter of the 13th century, somewhere between 1250 and 1275, and stood on its altar, with an angel at each of the saint's shoulders and six small compartments down the sides telling his legend. It is painted in the Greek manner, as Italians called the style that had come from Byzantium, and in Tuscany that was still the ordinary way to show a saint in the years when the sculptor Nicola Pisano signed the baptistery pulpit at Pisa, dated 1260, with figures taken from Roman sarcophagi. The panel left Tuscany during the Napoleonic suppression of the religious houses and reached Milan only in 1982, as a private gift. Nobody knows who painted it. He is called the Master of San Verano, after this one picture.