Saint Mark and Saint Augustine

Zanobi Machiavelli's pairing of Saint Mark and Saint Augustine, dated around 1470, was almost certainly part of a polyptych for a Florentine or Pisan church, where the selection of saints was determined by the patron's institutional affiliations or personal devotion. Mark — the evangelist whose lion made him immediately identifiable — and Augustine — the church father whose intellectual legacy was central to medieval theology — were a dignified pairing that would have suited a learned or ecclesiastical patron. Machiavelli's continued activity as a secondary Florentine painter in Pisa during the 1470s meant his work was reaching audiences whose primary exposure to Florentine art was through painters like him rather than the major masters, shaping provincial taste in the direction of the mainstream Florentine idiom.

The two-figure composition requires careful management of weight and spacing, and Machiavelli gives each saint a slightly different orientation — one frontal, one in three-quarter view — to introduce variety. Book and quill attributes are rendered with competent attention to material texture. The architecture framing the figures, if present, would follow the standard Florentine pilaster-arch format of polyptych wings.