Saint Bernardino

This Saint Bernardino at the Metropolitan Museum depicts the Franciscan preacher whose open-air sermons drew enormous crowds across central and northern Italy in the 1420s–1440s—his missions combining evangelical fervor, theological instruction, and social reform. Bernardino popularized the IHS monogram (the first three letters of Jesus in Greek) as a focal point for devotion, distributing wooden tablets bearing the symbol and asking crowds to replace their family emblems with it. Sano di Pietro, whose career was substantially defined by his role as primary painter of the Bernardino cult, rendered the saint countless times across altarpieces, miracle panels, and independent devotional images.

The saint holds his characteristic attribute — the IHS monogram tablet — rendered with Sano di Pietro's refined technique within the gold-ground format that lent sacred authority to devotional portraits.