Sant'Agostino

In 1944 a fresco came to light in the Piccolomini Chapel of Sant'Agostino in Siena. It was a Maestà, the Virgin enthroned among saints, painted around 1337 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the Sienese master of the Good Government frescoes in the city hall. It had survived because the marble altar the Piccolomini family put up in the 1590s had hidden it. It is the oldest painting left in the church.

Most of what surrounds it is younger. The Augustinian friars began the church in 1258, but after a fire in 1747 the architect Luigi Vanvitelli gave the interior the bright 18th-century form it has now.

Two Renaissance altarpieces draw visitors today. On a right-hand altar of the nave is Perugino's Crucifixion, painted in the first years of the 1500s for the chapel of the Chigi, the Sienese banking family. The Piccolomini altar itself frames the Adoration of the Magi by Sodoma, a painter who spent most of his career in Siena.