Benvenuto di Giovanni was one of the major artists working in Siena in the second half of the 15th century. A student of Lorenzo di Pietro known as il Vecchietta, with whom he collaborated in 1453 to an extent as yet to be defined on the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Siena. This collaboration, which clearly had an influence on the younger artist, marked the beginning of a long career in which his style evolved over the years in an independent and often unconventional way. His first signed and dated work is the 1446 Annunciation painted for the church of San Girolamo in Volterra, a work that shows his ties to his master, but with innovative iconographic representations. In successive years his elegant style revealed his contact with miniature painters of the period, such as Liberale da Verona and Girolamo da Cremona, who were in Siena between 1466 and 1473 to carry out important commissions like, for example, the decoration of choral and antiphonal books for the Cathedral.

The characteristics of the painting in question are, in fact, similar to those of a miniature in terms of lenticular expressive potency: precious materials, worked using multiple types of tools (punches) often created by the painters themselves, created the effect of broken, fractured light. While the circles around the halos are only intended to define the halos themselves, the punching around them defines light and its refraction to highlight the faces, sanctifying them and rendering them as pure luminous energy. The Virgin’s mantle is the most delicately-worked area: the myriad points of light of the lacquered red paint simulate the effect of brocade fabric, crowned by four large cabochon jewels.

Between 1480 and 1490, Benvenuto collaborated on the preparatory cartoons for the decoration of the floor of the Cathedral of Siena, in particular for a Sybil and for the Expulsion of Herod, aided by his son, Girolamo di Benvenuto. His style in those years was a classical sort of formal spareness, a perception of forms that seemed a return to the past, to a classical Middle Ages of imagery that only partially conformed to reality. The panel in question dates to the artist’s peak period, and is comparable in terms of the arrangement of the figures with the Madonna with Child, St Jerome and St Bernardino of Siena conserved at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which dates circa 1480-1485. There are also notable similarities with the shaping of the Madonna with Child in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, which dates to a slightly earlier period, and would thus place the panel being analyzed here at around 1475-1480.

Observing this painting we can understand the symbolic value of gold in 15th century Sienese art: divine light spreads over the panel, shining with celestial glimmers, making the subjects incorporeal as they transcend and ascend to a divine world.