The Annunciation with Saint Francis and Saint Louis of Toulouse [middle left panel]

Cosimo Tura painted the Roverella Altarpiece around 1474–1480 for the high altar of San Giorgio fuori le mura in Ferrara, commissioned by the bishop Bartolomeo Roverella and his family, and this middle-left panel showing Saint Francis and Saint Louis of Toulouse flanking the Annunciation is one of several surviving fragments from what was the most ambitious altarpiece commission of Tura's career. The altarpiece was later dismembered, its panels now dispersed across several European and American collections. The inclusion of Francis and Louis of Toulouse reflects the Roverella family's Franciscan affiliations. Tura's treatment of Francis — usually painted with gentle mystic stillness — is here characteristically tense, the figure's posture conveying restrained but palpable energy.

The panel's truncated state means the saint occupies a vertical format that emphasises his full-length standing pose. Tura's distinctive metallic drapery system is deployed in the Franciscan habit, the brown cloth made to look almost enamelled through his sharp highlight-and-shadow technique. The figure's hands show the careful attention to bone structure and tendon that marks Tura's most sustained anatomical work.