The Blessed Andrea Gallerani (died 1251)

This panel along with two others in the Lehman Collection (1975.1.56 and 1975.1.33) and three in the Department of European Paintings (1997.117.2; 1997.117.3, 32.100.95) belonged to an altarpiece, which may have been commissioned by the guild of the Pizzicaiuoli (purveyors of dry goods) in 1447 for their new chapel in the church of the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. The present panel and that portraying another standing figure (The Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni; 1975.1.56), formed pilasters of the altarpiece. The Blessed Andrea Gallerani, who died in 1251, is portrayed wearing a letter M surmounted by a cross, the emblem of the Confraternity of the Misericordia. The additional panel in the Lehman Collection and the three in European Paintings comprise a narrative cycle depicting scenes from the life of Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century Dominican saint, who was a minister to the poor as well as a mystic. The panels, based on a biography of Saint Catherine written in 1385 by her confessor Raymond of Capua, represent the first complete pictorial cycle of her life. This series may have been produced following Saint Catherine’s canonization in 1461 and added as a predella (base) to a preexisting altarpiece.
Additional panels that are conjecturally associated with the Pizzicaiuoli altarpiece are: the Purification of the Virgin (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena), Saint Catherine Invested with the Dominican Habit (Cleveland Museum of Art), Saint Catherine and the Beggar (Cleveland Museum of Art), Saint Catherine Dictating Her Dialogues to Raymond of Capua (Detroit Institute of Arts), Saint Catherine before a Pope (Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation), Death of Saint Catherine (private collection), Crucifixion (Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, on deposit at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), and pilaster figures representing Saint Galganus and Blessed Peter of Siena(?) (both Aartbischoppilijk Museum, Utrecht).