Saint Bernardino
Bernardino holds an IHS tablet on a gold ground: an early portrait apparently painted around 1447, before he was canonized. Full commentary ↓
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Saint Bernardino is a tempera and gold painting by Sano di Pietro (1447?) in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It measures 24.1 × 22.2 cm.
In the pictureOn a gold ground, an old man in a brown habit stands holding a blue tablet. Inside the tablet are a gold sun shape and the letters "IHS," and his halo is ringed with a pattern made by punching dots. His face is gaunt, his eyes are lowered, and there are scratches here and there in the gold.
BackgroundBernardino died in 1444 and was made a saint in 1450. If this painting dates from around 1447, he was painted with a halo before he was officially a saint, which shows how quickly the people of Siena embraced him as one. Sano di Pietro repeated the same composition many times, and this site also has another version with a blue ground for comparison.
Puzzle tipThe many gold pieces are confusing, but they divide into pieces with the halo's dot pattern and pieces without it. Fit the blue tablet, the face and the brown habit pieces first, and fill in the gold starting around the halo. 48 pieces is about right.
- Artist
- Italian, Siena 1405–1481 Siena
- Classification
- Paintings
- Medium
- Tempera on wood, gold ground
- Dimensions
- 24.1 × 22.2 cm
- Credit line
- Robert Lehman Collection, 1975
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
Stories about this work
- Saint Bernardino, Painted Three Times by Sienese Artists
This site has three 15th-century Sienese portraits of Saint Bernardino. What you notice when you compare pictures of the same person.
- Why Early Renaissance Altarpieces Have Gold Backgrounds: Reading the Lehman Panels
Why is the background of every gold-ground panel in the Robert Lehman Collection gold? Early Renaissance painting, explored by putting the panels together as puzzles.
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