Saint Francis and the Poor Knight, and Francis's Vision

Sassetta's Saint Francis and the Poor Knight, painted around 1437 for the National Gallery, depicts an episode from the Franciscan legend in which Francis gives his cloak to a needy knight. This panel belongs to the dismembered Sansepolcro altarpiece, one of Sassetta's most important commissions and a masterwork of Sienese Quattrocento painting. Sassetta — Stefano di Giovanni — was the dominant painter in Siena during the first half of the fifteenth century, maintaining the city's Gothic tradition of refined spirituality and jewel-like color even as Florentine artists were developing the naturalistic revolution of the Early Renaissance.

The scene unfolds in a Sienese hill town rendered with Sassetta's luminous color and precise architectural detail, the encounter between saint and knight framed by the geometrically ordered buildings of the piazza.