Saints Zeno and Jerome

Francesco Pesellino's Saints Zeno and Jerome, painted around 1457 for the National Gallery, formed part of a larger altarpiece ensemble. Pesellino died young in 1457, and several of his unfinished works were completed by his workshop or by Filippo Lippi, making questions of attribution particularly complex for his late paintings. This work belongs to the Early Renaissance, the transformative period in European art when painters first applied mathematical perspective, naturalistic figure modeling, and archaeological interest in antiquity to the inherited traditions of medieval devotional painting. The tension between Gothic grace and Renaissance structure gives art of this period a distinctive energy.

The two saints are rendered with Pesellino's characteristic precision and luminous color, their figures displaying the influence of both Filippo Lippi's soft modeling and the firmer drawing tradition of earlier Florentine painting.