Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara, Agatha, and Margaret

Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara, Agatha, and Margaret from 1470 by Giovanni di Paolo at the Metropolitan Museum depicts four of the most venerated virgin martyrs of the early Church. The panel demonstrates Giovanni di Paolo's late style with its refined decorative quality and distinctive figural types. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays brilliant, jewel-like color, gold grounds, lyrical figure types of Gothic grace, perspectival experiments that create strange compressed spaces, intense narrative invention.

The four saints are distinguished by their individual attributes and expressions, rendered with Giovanni di Paolo's characteristic angular elegance and the rich coloring of the Sienese tradition.