Saint Anthony Abbot [left panel]

Puccio di Simone, a Florentine painter active in the mid-fourteenth century and follower of Bernardo Daddi, created this Saint Anthony Abbot around 1354 as the left panel of a dismembered polyptych. Saint Anthony Abbot, the Egyptian hermit and father of Christian monasticism, was enormously popular in Gothic Europe as a protector against ergotism (Saint Anthony's fire) and patron of livestock. Originally in the Andrew W. Mellon Collection (now National Gallery of Art), this panel represents the devotional art of mid-Trecento Florence.

Painted in egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, this Saint Anthony Abbot displays Puccio di Simone's characteristic Daddesque style with soft, rounded forms and gentle modeling. The saint is rendered in his traditional dark Tau-cross-marked habit, with careful attention to his iconographic attributes against an elaborately tooled gold ground.