Saint John the Evangelist

This panel of Saint John the Evangelist by the Master of Saint Francis is part of a dispersed altarpiece that originally stood in the church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia. The Master of Saint Francis was the most important Umbrian painter of the mid-thirteenth century, responsible for the earliest frescoes in the Lower Church at Assisi. His monumental single-figure saints, now divided between the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum, represent some of the finest surviving examples of pre-Giottesque Italian painting.

Executed in egg tempera on gold-ground panel, the saint is rendered with the Master of Saint Francis's characteristic combination of Byzantine solemnity and emerging Gothic expressiveness. The figure stands in a shallow spatial field with carefully modeled drapery folds that suggest three-dimensional form beneath the fabric.