bernardino da siena

Antonio da Fabriano's image of Bernardino da Siena dates from after the great Franciscan preacher's canonisation in 1450 — just six years after his death in 1444, one of the fastest canonisations in medieval Church history. Bernardino's cult spread rapidly through central Italy, and devotional images of the saint proliferated in the decades following canonisation. Antonio da Fabriano was a Marchigian painter whose work is known from a handful of signed panels; this image belongs to the votive portrait tradition through which the new cult was propagated in Umbria and the Marches.

Antonio renders Bernardino with his characteristic attribute — the IHS monogram sun disc that the saint deployed in his popular preaching campaigns — rendered with gilded precision. The saint's gaunt, intense physiognomy, worn by decades of itinerant preaching, is depicted with a portraiture-like directness unusual in early cult images. Tempera on panel with gold ground, in the Central Italian tradition.