Pietro di Francesco degli Orioli (Siena 1458-1496)

This painting is sold with a copy of a letter of expertise by Roberto Longhi, dated 1967, in which he attributes the picture to Giacomo Pacchiarotto (1474-1540), proposing a date around 1520. In two articles of 1982 Alessandro Angelini established that many devotional panels such as this one, which were traditionally attributed to Pacchiarotto, were in fact by his older contemporary Orioli, who can now be seen was one of the key artists of late Quattrocento Siena (A. Angelini, 'Da Giacomo Pacchiarotti a Pietro Orioli', Prospettiva, 29, 1982, pp. 72-8 and Idem, 'Pietro Orioli e il momento urbinate della pittura senese del Quattrocento', Prospettiva, 30, 1982, pp. 30-43).

We are grateful to Mr. Everett Fahy for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs and for pointing out that a similar version by the same author is in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. The Baltimore panel, smaller in size, was the central part of a predella, which included four other compartments, formerly in the J.P. Morgan collection and now dispersed (two of them are at present in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge).