Saint Benedict admitting Saints Maurus and Placidus into the Benedictine Order: Predella Panel

A bearded and venerable Saint Benedict admits two disciples, Maurus and Placidus, to his newly founded religious order. They were young Roman noblemen who were sent to Benedict to be educated and became two of his earliest followers, and saints themselves.Members of the Benedictine Order wore black, but here they are dressed in the white habits of the Camaldolese Order, founded in the eleventh century as a reformed branch of the Benedictines; this panel was painted for them. It comes from the predella of a large polyptych (a multi-panelled altarpiece) painted for a church just outside Florence. Saint Benedict was the church’s patron saint, and the small scenes in the predella show episodes from his life (another is also in our collection – Incidents in the Life of Saint Benedict: Predella Panel).The predella originally had three compartments with two scenes in each. This panel, which was at the far left, was next to a scene now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome: the painted landscape continues from one to the other and the pattern of the wood grain on the back matches, showing that they were painted on the same plank. When they were in the altarpiece, the predella panels were set into shaped compartments in the base of the frame, which diagonally covered the top and bottom left-hand corners. When the frame was removed it left unpainted triangles which have been filled in with modern paint.We don't know exactly when the altarpiece was taken apart, but the predella panels show no sign of the water damage which affects the main tier panels. If, as seems likely, this was caused by the devastating floods of 1557 in Florence, the predella must have been separated from the main altarpiece before then – probably in 1529 when the church at San Benedetto was destroyed.