Sassestta, the most innovative and influential painter of Sienese quattrocento.

St. Anthony Beaten by Devils / Sassetta
Created 1423-26
Medium Oil on panel
Dimensions 9½ x 15 ¾ in / 24 x 39 cm
Location Italy 🇮🇹, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena

Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo (c.1400-50), known as Sassetta, may be the most innovative painter of the Sienese quattrocento. Alongside Florence, Siena was a leading cultural center in Tuscany. Sienese painting was characterized by decorative, mystical works, emphasizing the miraculous and divine.
Sassetta emerged within this flourishing tradition, but began to incorporate innovations from the more naturalistic Florentine School. The Altarpiece of the Eucharist is his earliest known work, commissioned in 1423 for the Church of the Carmelite Order. It is a triptych depicting scenes from the lives of St. Anthony and Thomas Aquinas, the central panel of which was lost when the altarpiece was disassembled in 1777. St. Anthony Beaten by Devils is one of the surviving panels. The hermit St. Anthony is being bludgeoned with clubs by three devils intent on breaking his faith. This terrible scene has an emotional resonance typical of later Renaissance works, as the old man lies helpless beside his abandoned walking stick. The muted gray light pervading the sparse, rocky landscape of St. Anthony’s isolation offsets the vivid glow of his halo and the fiery reds punctuating the devils. Sassetta’s fusion of Sienese art with Florentine innovation was instrumental in bringing Sienese painting from the International Gothic into the Renaissance style. Although Siena’s artistic progression would later be tempered by the city’s economic and political decline, Sassetta’s influence was widespread in Siena and beyond. SLF in 1001 Paintings

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