Sano di Pietro

The life of Sano di Pietro,
scene by scene

1. 1428Siena

   In 1428 the name Sano di Pietro is entered on the roll of the painters' guild in Siena. He was in his early twenties, now free to work as a painter in his own city. Scholars think he learned his trade near the older Sienese painter Sassetta.

   Then comes a puzzle. From that entry until 1444, no surviving painting carries his name and a date. Some scholars believe the anonymous painter known as the Master of the Osservanza was the young Sano. Others point to Sassetta, or to a shared workshop. The question is still open.

2. 1444Siena

   In 1444 Sano signed and dated a large altarpiece for San Girolamo, a Sienese convent of the Gesuati. That order had been founded by a Sienese man, Giovanni Colombini, and Sano placed him among the saints standing beside the enthroned Madonna. It is the first work by Sano that the records firmly tie to him.

   Over the centuries the altarpiece was taken apart, and some of its small predella scenes ended up at the Louvre in Paris. In 2025 the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena borrowed the Louvre panels and put the altarpiece back together for visitors.

   Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness is dated to these same years. An old saint with a long white beard stops on a stony slope among bare trees, both hands raised. A gray rabbit crouches in the lower left, and a band of real gold glints in the red sky.

   Painted around this timeSaint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness
3. 1445Siena

   In 1445 Sano finished a fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall of Siena. On a wall of the Sala di Biccherna there had been a Coronation of the Virgin painted by Lippo Vanni in 1352. Domenico di Bartolo began renewing it, and Sano completed the work and signed it.

   From then on the city kept him busy. He and his workshop also painted covers for the account books of the Biccherna, the office that handled the city's money. Churches, convents and the government were all his clients.

4. 1450Siena

   In 1450 Pope Nicholas V declared the Sienese friar Bernardino a saint. Bernardino had died in L'Aquila in 1444. In his lifetime he had drawn huge crowds to his sermons in the Campo, the great square of Siena.

   Once their own preacher was a saint, people wanted his image, and Sano painted Bernardino again and again. Two of his panels are now in the cathedral museum in Siena. One shows Bernardino preaching in the Campo in front of the town hall, the other in front of the church of San Francesco. Both remember the sermons he gave in his home city.

5. 1459Siena

   In 1459 Sano took over the fresco on the Porta Romana, the southern gate of Siena. The job had belonged to Sassetta, often called his teacher. Sassetta fell ill while painting on the gate and died in April 1450, leaving the Coronation of the Virgin unfinished.

   Sano carried the fresco on over several years and brought it to completion. Painted on a gate open to wind and rain, it survives only in fragments.

6. 1481Siena

   In 1481 Sano di Pietro died in Siena, more than fifty years after his name first went on the guild roll. His workshop had produced Madonnas, altarpieces and manuscript illuminations in steady streams, which is why so many museums today have panels labeled with his name.

   His Saint Anthony panel later belonged to Prince Léon Ouroussoff in Vienna. In 1920 the American banker Philip Lehman bought it through the dealers Duveen Brothers. It came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975 with the Robert Lehman Collection.