Jacopo di Cione and workshop, 'Saint Anthony Abbot', about 1365-70

This small panel painting captures a bearded saint with a shaved head. He leans on a long stick shaped like a tau or T-shaped cross. He holds a book bound in red leather. We can spot the snout of a black pig in the lower-right corner. Saints in religious paintings are easy to recognise by their attributes. The tau cross and pig tell us this is Saint Anthony Abbot (251–356), a fourth-century Egyptian hermit. He was famous for his strict lifestyle and for being one of the founders of Western monasticism.

The tau cross also appears in Giovanni di Nicola’s Saint Anthony Abbot (National Gallery, London). The cross and the pig became linked with the saint in the Middle Ages. Around 1100, the Order of the Hospitallers of Saint Anthony was founded at the Benedictine abbey at La Motte in south-eastern France. This abbey claimed to have relics of the saint. It became a pilgrimage centre for those seeking a cure from skin diseases such as ergotism, also called Saint Anthony’s Fire. The hospitallers wore black robes decorated with a blue tau cross. The Order had a special privilege that allowed its pigs to roam freely in the street. This is why the pig also became one of the saint’s attributes.

This painting is one of 12 panels showing standing saints. Six are on loan to the National Gallery. They are known as the Littleton Pilaster Saints. Their size and shape tell us that the panels once formed the pilasters of a large altarpiece or polyptych. This was possibly made for the Camaldolite monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in Florence.

As a hermit, Saint Anthony fitted perfectly with the strict Camaldolese, who were a reformed branch of the Benedictine Order. The monks lived in solitude in their own cells. They came together only to eat and pray. Saint Anthony often appears in Camaldolese altarpieces wearing their characteristic white robes, for example in the right main tier panel of Lorenzo Monaco’s San Benedetto Altarpiece, painted for the Camaldolite monastery of San Benedetto fuori della Porta Pinti in Florence. Lorenzo Monaco was himself a monk (or monaco in Italian) at Santa Maria degli Angeli.

The Cione brothers presumably arranged the panels vertically on top of each other down either side of a central panel, forming pilasters with two sides. We cannot be completely sure of their positions. The wider panels of the evangelists, including Saint Luke and Saint John the Evangelist, may have stood next to the base. The narrower panels measure just under 50 x 12 cm. They were probably placed on either side of the central panel. The way the Cione brothers composed the paintings gives us clues about their positions. Saint Anthony looks directly out at the viewer and was perhaps right next to the central panel on the right. Saint Peter Damian may have been on his right, looking inwards. Alternatively, the evangelists could have been next to the central panel, with the smaller paintings on the slanted outer side of the pilasters.