I rather like medieval religious art and I accept that I should probably get out more. There is often such an intensity of devotion behind these works that even a relatively small panel can carry considerable weight. This painting of Saint Agatha, attributed to the Sienese master Pietro Lorenzetti and dated to around 1315, is considered a work of national importance and has even acquired its own Wikipedia page, which is perhaps the modern equivalent of canonisation. Lorenzetti was one of the great painters of medieval Italy, although the history of this particular panel becomes uncertain after it left Siena. It eventually entered the collection of the Musée de Tessé in 1863, having travelled rather further than most fourteenth-century wooden panels could reasonably have expected.
Saint Agatha was one of the most widely venerated saints of the Middle Ages. According to tradition, she was martyred in Sicily during the third century after rejecting the advances of a Roman official and refusing to abandon her Christian faith. Here she holds the palm of martyrdom, while her composed expression contrasts with the deeply unpleasant fate described in her legend. Medieval artists often preferred to emphasise a saint’s spiritual victory rather than dwell on the physical details of their suffering, although it is fair to say that restraint was not always a universal feature of medieval religious imagery. Some artists were perfectly willing to ensure that nobody left the church uncertain about what martyrdom involved and there are some rather, er, bloody versions of the beheading of John the Baptist.
Anyway, I’m not sure if it has been restored, but it’s in decent condition and I thought it rather glistened in the heat of Le Mans.