Trinity, the Virgin, and Two Saints

By 1510 Signorelli was an old man working mostly for his home region around Cortona in Tuscany. A local brotherhood, the Confraternity of the Trinity, which looked after pilgrims, commissioned this tall altarpiece. The arrangement is calm and strictly balanced. The Virgin sits enthroned between the archangels Michael and Gabriel, the bishops Augustine and Athanasius stand below, and the Holy Trinity presides above them all. It is a quieter, more symmetrical picture than the tangled, muscular scenes he had made at the height of his career, the kind of steadying design a confraternity would want over an altar where travellers stopped to pray. Athanasius, the early bishop paired here with Augustine, was remembered above all for defending the doctrine of the Trinity, which is why he stands under this particular sky.