Sassetta's first documented altar-piece, for the Sienese guild of wool merchants, came as an artistic bolt from the blue in early fifteenth-century Siena, and the precocity and innovatory qualities of the surviving elements of the work, painted in 1423-25, continue to intrigue art historians. The ensemble was dismantled and dispersed before 1816, when the church of S. Pellegrino and the annexed Arte della Lana chapel were razed to the ground, but fortunately Angiolo Maria Carapelli and the abbot Girolamo Carli made elaborate descriptions of it when it still stood in the chapel.' It was an ornate, pinnacled triptych (Fig.2), with an unusual central image of an ostensory carried by angels above a landscape in the central panel, flanked by Sts Thomas Aquinas and Anthony Abbot on the lateral panels. There were pilasters with small figures of saints and the pinnacles showed the Coronation of the Virgin, the Angel and Virgin of the Annunciation, and two half-length figures of prophets. In the predella, Carli describes scenes from the life of St Anthony, a Last Supper (Fig.3), a scene with an expiring communicant (Fig.4) and two scenes relating to St Thomas and the Sacrament. An exceptional inscription confirmed Sassetta's authorship: 'Hinc opus omne. Patres. Stefanus construxit ad aras. Senensis Johan- nis. Agens citra lapsus adultos.

The most direct channel for the involvement of Sodoma (1477-1549) inJulius II's projects at the Vatican Palace is to be found in the patronage connexions which linked the artist early on with the Chigi family. Having arrived in Siena before 1503, within a few years Sodoma had succeeded in establishing not only a privileged relationship with the Benedictines of Monte Oliveto,' but also a lasting connexion with the Chigi, one of the most prominent families in Siena. It has been rea- sonably supposed that Sigismondo Chigi (1479-1526) was the patron behind the Nativity for the church of the Augustinian hermits at Lecceto, a focus of Chigi devotion in the early years of the Cinquecento,2 and it is quite certain that between Autumn 1505 and March 1507 Sodoma painted two cycles of considerable importance in the Palazzo Chigi in Siena. Fabio Chigi, a direct descendant of Sigismondo who later became pope Alexander VII, describes the paintings in his family Commentarii: they consisted of a ceiling with a series of small panels on Ovidian themes ('lacunar quidem fabulas ex Ovidio desumptas ostendit') and a frieze with the exploits of Julius Caesar.3 The latter is either destroyed, or perhaps hidden under the false ceilings which were constructed in the rooms of the piano nobile of the palace in the Neo-classical period. What can be discovered about it, however, brings us close to the themes that concern us here.

In 1983 Alison Luchs published an important body of archival and genealogical material that established the links between the patrons of Raphael's two altar-pieces for S. Francesco al Prato, Perugia: the Vatican Coronation of the Virgin (Fig.33) and the Borghese Entombment Fig.34).' Most historians have subsequently recognised a relationship between the two commissions, but have been unable to refine Luchs's conclusions. In 1986 Leopold Ettlinger acknowledged that no firm evidence existed regarding the function or location of either painting in S. Francesco al Prato,2 while more recently Hubert Locher has argued that the function and setting of the two altar-pieces were fundamentally different,3 proposing that the was not painted for a Baglioni family chapel, but for a location in the south transept above a hypothetical sacrament altar, close to the high altar of the church.