Adoring Saints: Right Main Tier Panel

A company of richly dressed saints, many with impressive beards, gaze adoringly at something on their right, or turn to talk to each other. This panel was part of a large polyptych painted by Lorenzo Monaco for the monastery of San Benedetto fuori della Porta Pinti in Florence.They are looking at The Coronation of the Virgin; you can see – on the far left – parts of the wings of angels who sit around the throne. Other parts of the altarpiece are in our collection and in collections around the world. Arranged in three tiers, the saints are carefully structured so that their gestures and colours balance and echo those in Adoring Saints: Left Main Tier Panel, giving the whole polyptych an almost musical harmony.San Benedetto belonged to Camaldolese Order, a small reformed monastic order founded by an Italian monk, Saint Romuald, in 1012. Although they followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, Saint Romuald wanted them to live a stricter and more solitary life. They lived in individual cells, like hermits, although they came together to eat and pray.The saints here were well known to the monks at San Benedetto. At the front, in the white habit of the Camaldolites, is Saint Romuald, the Order’s founder. Next to him is Saint Peter, the first pope, dressed in yellow and blue and holding a large key – the key to heaven, given to him by Christ. Both Peter and Romuald appear on another altarpiece for the Order, made for the nuns at Pratovecchio.At the very back, wearing the white and gold papal tiara, is Pope Gregory the Great, the sixth-century Benedictine who wrote the Life of Saint Benedict; the dove of the Holy Ghost is whispering in his ear to inspire him. Beside him is Saint Dominic, the pair to Saint Francis in the other wing, and founder of the Dominican Order.In places the paint has worn thin and we can see traces of underdrawing in the yellow of Saint Peter’s robe and the pink of John the Evangelist’s next to him. Technical analysis has identified kermes, a pigment widely used in manuscript illumination, in Saint John’s robe; Lorenzo Monaco also painted books.