TUSCAN SCHOOL, 15TH CENTURY

This panel has been plausibly identified as from the lower section of a representation of the Pentecost. The two men stand for the multitudes who marvelled as the Holy Spirit revealed itself to the apostles who were gathered in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem: they hear the message in their own languages through the open door.
The first Tuscan artist to include auditors in this way was apparently Giotto in his panel in the National Gallery, London (no. 578), but the most ambitious Florentine treatment of the theme is a fresco by Andrea di Bonaiuto in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella, Florence. It has been plausibly suggested that this fragment was from an upright treatment of the subject, like the panel from Jacopo di Cione’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece (London, National Gallery, no. 578), in which the event is heard though an open door to the lower floor of the building. The painter was clearly aware of such iconographic precedents and is likely to have been Tuscan rather than Bolognese as formerly supposed.