Italian, Umbrian, possibly Master of San Crispino, A Bishop Saint

These three saints – An Evangelist, A Bishop Saint and another Evangelist – probably formed part of the frame of some large composition.

Unlike the vast majority of medieval and Renaissance paintings in our collection, these three fragments were not painted on panels or even linen supports. They are frescoes, and were painted on an internal wall of a public building in Assisi. The Palazzo del Podesta, also more accurately known as the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, was built between 1275 and 1288. It was the headquarters of the ‘people’s captain’, the chief officer representing the populares, wealthy urban professionals who were increasingly playing a role in the town’s civic life. Such buildings were often extensively decorated in the Middle Ages. For example, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fresco series, An Allegory of Good and Bad Government – painted on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338–9 – is bordered by decorative bands containing busts in similar quatrefoil medallions.

The pictures were acquired by the National Gallery in the 1920s. They had been removed from their original setting in 1923, before the building was sold and the interior reconstructed. At that time it was thought that the Palazzo had been the home of the artists who worked on the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi (the mother church of the Franciscan Order) in the late thirteenth century, but these fragments were soon redated to the mid-fourteenth century. They have recently been attributed to the so-called Master of San Crispino, who decorated the Oratorio di San Crispino at Assisi in the 1330s.