Click on any panel in the altarpiece reconstruction below to see an enlarged version of the image. Color reproductions in the reconstruction indicate panels in the National Gallery of Art collection.
Overview
This painting presents the birth of the Virgin as a domestic tableau. Behind the parted red curtain of her bed, Mary’s mother, Anna, rests after giving birth. Her husband, Joachim, sits outside the bedchamber; his is no ordinary child, and he appears lost in thought, unaware of his companion. The infant Mary stands on sturdy legs supported and admired by two serving women, as another pours water from a pitcher so Anna can wash her hands. A fourth woman enters through the doorway, bringing a roasted chicken to the new mother. She looks out of the picture directly, drawing us into the scene. The emphasis on the human and the familiar—that chicken is almost in the center of the painting—made the Virgin and her family approachable to viewers and brought sacred events into the sphere of their own experience.
This and two other small paintings by Andrea di Bartolo at the National Gallery of Art,
Entry
The three panels in the National Gallery of Art collection (this work,
The scenes from the life of the Virgin painted by Andrea are based on an apocryphal text called De Ortu Beatae Mariae et Infantia Salvatoris, attributed to the evangelist Matthew. Later sources enriched this narrative with additional episodes. According to the legend, the marriage of Joachim (father of the Virgin Mary) and Anna remained childless for many years, a state that was interpreted by the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem as punishment for grave sins. Therefore, Joachim’s offering of a sacrificial lamb was rejected, and he was expelled from the temple. The scene represented in this work is usually identified as Joachim and the Beggars but refers instead to a previous episode in the life of Mary’s parents. A version of the legend, evidently familiar in Tuscany, recounts that Joachim and Anna lived in a particularly charitable way, dividing all their worldly goods into three parts: a third was allocated to the poor, another third to the temple, and only a third was kept for their own needs.
At this point in the sequence, other episodes usually illustrated in cycles of the childhood of Mary are likely to have followed: namely, the Angel’s Annunciation of the Birth of Mary both to Joachim and to Anna, and the Return of Joachim to the City, linked with the Meeting of Husband and Wife at the Golden Gate. In the following scene of the Nativity of the Virgin, Andrea faithfully followed the model proposed by his father, Bartolo di Fredi, in the cycle of frescoes in the church of Sant’Agostino at San Gimignano and elsewhere:
After initial attempts to attribute the three panels to Bartolo di Fredi,
From a stylistic point of view, the scenes from the childhood of Mary can be compared with such paintings as the six stories of Saint Galgano now divided between the Museo Nazionale in Pisa and the National Gallery in Dublin (these, too, most likely originated as parts of a panel in the form of a dossal);
Comparisons of the Gallery’s panels with the figures of saints in the Church of the Osservanza in Siena (1413), on the other hand, show that the latter belong to a more advanced phase in the artist’s career. Some lateral panels of polyptychs, such as that in Tuscania Cathedral, of which the predella has also survived, are easier to compare with the Osservanza saints. In contrast to the tall and slender saints of the Osservanza, who wear draperies furrowed by long, close-set, sharply undercut folds, those of Tuscania are more robust in physique and more placid in expression; their statuesque figures seem to indicate an earlier date of execution, somewhat closer in style to the group of miniatures Andrea probably realized in the last decade of the fourteenth century.
The closest stylistic affinities of the Gallery’s panels therefore are with works whose figures are more robust and more sedate in character. Paintings that fall into this category — apart from the polyptych in Buonconvento and the altarpiece now in the museum in Murano, both datable to the last decade of the fourteenth century — include the fragment with the Virgin Annunciate formerly in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the fragmentary Saint Michael Archangel in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena (no. 63), for both of which Laurence Kanter (1986) proposed a provenance from the same altarpiece of which the Gallery’s panels originally formed a part.
Miklós Boskovits (1935–2011)
March 21, 2016
Provenance
This panel, along with NGA 1939.1.41 and 1939.1.43, are stated to have come from the collection of a contessa Giustiniani, Genoa;[1] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); sold July 1930 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1939 to NGA.
Technical Summary
This painting, along with its companions
The paintings most likely were executed on a
Stephen Pichetto thinned and
Bibliography
- 1941
- National Gallery of Art. Book of Illustrations. Washington, 1941: 51 (repro.), 236.
- 1941
- Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 3, no. 153.
- 1942
- Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 242, repro. 53.
- 1949
- Brandi, Cesare. Quattrocentisti senesi. Milan, 1949: 243, pl. 9.
- 1955
- Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. 2nd ed. New York, 1955: pl. 21.
- 1959
- Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 36, repro.
- 1964
- Mojzer, Miklós. "Vier sienesische Quattrocento-Tafeln des Christlichen Museums zu Esztergom." Pantheon 22 (1964): 1, 2 (repro.), 6 n. 5.
- 1965
- Boskovits, Miklós, Miklós Mojzer, and András Mucsi. Das Christliche Museum von Esztergom (Gran). Budapest, 1965: 44.
- 1965
- Boskovits, Miklós, Miklós Mojzer, András Mucsi, Alfréd Schiller, Elizabeth Hoch, and Susanna Horn. Christian Art in Hungary: Collections from the Esztergom Christian Museum. Budapest, 1965: 52.
- 1965
- Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 7.
- 1966
- Boskovits, Miklós. Early Italian Panel Paintings. Budapest, 1966: 40.
- 1966
- Schiller, Gertrud. Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst. 6 vols. Gütersloh, 1966-1990: 4, pt. 2:64, 65, 71, 246, 316, fig. 520.
- 1966
- Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 65-66, fig. 176.
- 1968
- Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools. 3 vols. London, 1968: 1:8.
- 1968
- National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 1, repro.
- 1971
- Carli, Enzo. I pittori senesi. Siena, 1971: 138, fig. 123.
- 1971
- Os, Hendrik W. van. "Andrea di Bartolo’s Assumption of the Virgin." Arts in Virginia 2 (1971): 4.
- 1972
- Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 7, 300, 645.
- 1975
- European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 12, repro.
- 1975
- Mucsi, András. Katalog der Alten Gemäldegalerie des Christlichen Museums zu Esztergom. Budapest, 1975: 42.
- 1979
- Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:4-5; 2:pl. 3.
- 1981
- Carli, Enzo. La pittura senese del Trecento. 1st ed. Milan, 1981: 238, fig. 279.
- 1982
- Il gotico a Siena: miniature, pitture, oreficerie, oggetti d’arte. Exh. cat. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Florence, 1982: 313, 317.
- 1983
- Kasten, Eberhard. "Andrea di Bartolo." In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker. Edited by Günter Meissner. 3 vols. Leipzig, 1983-1990: 2(1986):974, 976.
- 1983
- L’Art gothique siennois: enluminure, peinture, orfèvrerie, sculpture. Exh. cat. Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon. Florence, 1983: 280, 284.
- 1984
- Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 82, no. 38, color repro.
- 1985
- European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 18, repro.
- 1986
- Kanter, Laurence B. "Giorgio di Andrea di Bartolo." Arte cristiana 74 (1986): 21-22, 24, repro. 26.
- 1986
- Maderna, Valentina, ed. Il polittico di Andrea di Bartolo a Brera Restaurato. Exh. cat. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Florence, 1986: 17.
- 1988
- Gurrieri, Francesco, and Luciano Bellosi, eds. La Sede storica del Monte dei Paschi di Siena: vicende costruttive e opere d’arte. Florence, 1988: 276.
- 1991
- Chelazzi Dini, Giulietta. "Andrea di Bartolo." In Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale. Edited by Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana. 12 vols. Rome, 1991-2002: 1(1991):595.
- 1992
- Kasten, Eberhard. "Andrea di Bartolo." In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker. Edited by Günter Meissner. 87+ vols. Munich and Leipzig, 1992+: 3(1992):512, 514.
- 1994
- Lorentz, Philippe. "De Sienne a Strasbourg: posterité d’une composition d’Ambrogio Lorenzetti, la Nativité de la Vierge de l’Hôpital Santa Maria della Scala à Sienne." In Hommage à Michel Laclotte: Etudes sur la peinture du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance. Edited by Luciano Bellosi, Pierre Rosenberg, Cécile Scailliérz, and Dominique Thiébault. Milan and Paris, 1994: 125 (repro.), 126, 127, 130-131 n. 45.
- 1997
- Chelazzi Dini, Giulietta, Alessandro Angelini, and Bernardina Sani. Sienese Painting From Duccio to the Birth of the Baroque. New York, 1997: 200-201.
- 1997
- Chelazzi Dini, Giulietta. "La cosidetta crisi della metà del Trecento (1348-1390)." In Pittura senese. Edited by Giulietta Chelazzi Dini, Alessandro Angelini and Bernardina Sani. 1st ed. Milan, 1997: 200.
- 1998
- Frinta, Mojmír S. Punched Decoration on Late Medieval Panel and Miniature Painting. Prague, 1998: 69.
- 2009
- Bellosi, Luciano, et al., eds. La collezione Salini: dipinti, sculture e oreficerie dei secoli XII, XIII, XIV e XV. 4 vols. Florence, 2009, 2015: 1(2009):238.
- 2016
- Boskovits, Miklós. Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, 2016: 14-25, color repro.
Related Content
- Sort by:
- Results layout:
Altarpiece Reconstruction

Reconstruction of a dispersed altarpiece by Andrea di Bartolo:
a.
b. Expulsion of Joachim (?), lost
c. Joachim Leaving Jerusalem (Entry fig. 1)
d. Annunciation of the Birth of Mary (?), lost
e. Lost
f. Meeting at Porta Aurea (?), lost
g.
h.
i. Marriage of the Virgin (?), lost