Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Eligius with Two Pairs of Kneeling Worshippers (one side of a processional banner) (formerly attributed to Barnaba da Modena)

Spinello Aretino's processional banner at the Victoria and Albert Museum, painted around 1370, depicting Saints Anthony Abbot and Eligius with two pairs of kneeling worshippers, was carried in civic processions and displayed at feast days in Tuscany. Spinello Aretino was a prolific late-Gothic Florentine fresco painter whose workshop decorated churches across Tuscany with dynamic narrative cycles, and this portable devotional banner documents his work in a different format from his more celebrated frescoes. The double-sided processional banner served a specific liturgical function — carried by confraternities in processions honoring their patron saints — and the two saints depicted here (Anthony Abbot, patron against plague and skin disease, and Eligius, patron of metalworkers and smiths) suggest a confraternity with those specific devotional and occupational connections. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds this work as part of its collection of Italian medieval art, which includes important examples of the processional and devotional objects that served popular religious practice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This work demonstrates Gothic painting techniques.