Annunciate Angel, the Apostle Andrew, a Bishop Saint (Savinus?), and Saints Dominic and Francis of Assisi [left]; Virgin Annunciate and Saints Bartholomew, Lawrence, Lucy, and Agatha [right]

Bartolomeo Bulgarini's altarpiece wings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, painted around 1360, depicting the Annunciate Angel with multiple saints on the left panel and the Virgin Annunciate with more saints on the right, document the Sienese painter's continuation of Duccio's legacy in the generation following the Black Death. Bulgarini was a leading Sienese painter of the mid-fourteenth century, developing a more intense emotional expressiveness than his predecessors while maintaining the gold-ground formalism and refined linearity of the Sienese tradition. The pairing of the Annunciation — Gabriel and the Virgin on separate panels — with rows of standing saints was a standard polyptych format that displayed the full complement of a church's or confraternity's patron saints while centering the devotional program on the Incarnation's initiating moment. The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds an important collection of Italian medieval and Renaissance painting with particular strength in Sienese work, providing the comparative context for assessing Bulgarini's achievement within the tradition of Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers that he inherited and extended.

This work demonstrates Gothic painting techniques.