Tarlati Polyptych

In April 1320 the bishop of Arezzo, Guido Tarlati, hired a young Sienese painter named Pietro Lorenzetti to build a tall many-panelled altarpiece for the town's main church. Tarlati was as much a warlord as a churchman, and he wanted something grand: a Madonna in an ermine-lined robe at the centre, ringed by saints, all on gold. Lorenzetti signed it, calling himself Pietro of Siena, and it remains in that same church of Santa Maria della Pieve today, seven centuries on. He and his brother Ambrogio were reshaping Italian painting toward real weight and space in these years. Both of them vanish from the record around 1348, the year the Black Death swept through Siena.