Saint Apollonia

Sassetta's Saint Apollonia at the National Gallery of Art, painted around 1435, depicts the early Christian martyr whose teeth were extracted during her torture before she was burned alive — making her the patron saint of those suffering from toothache and dental ailments. Her cult was widespread throughout medieval Europe, and her standard attribute — the pincers holding an extracted tooth — made her immediately identifiable among the host of female martyrs that populated altarpiece panels. Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni) was the dominant painter of Sienese Gothic art in the fifteenth century, creating works of visionary spiritual intensity that synthesized the International Gothic legacy with a personal mysticism. This panel was likely a wing of a polyptych altarpiece, with the saint shown standing in the formal hieratic manner appropriate to her role as an object of devotion and intercession. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds an important group of Sienese primitive panels that document the distinctive achievement of the Sienese school — its combination of Byzantine formality, Gothic elegance, and deeply felt spiritual expression that distinguished it from the more rationalist Florentine tradition developing simultaneously.

The saint holds her attribute of pincers with extracted tooth, rendered with Sassetta's refined linear style and luminous palette in a devotional panel of quiet spiritual dignity.