The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul

Master of the Osservanza (Sano di Pietro?)

National Gallery of Art

Three scenes showing the same person, Saint Anthony, are spaced along a path that winds from the lower right corner and around hills and trees into the distance in this vertical painting. In all three scenes, Saint Anthony has pale skin, a long white beard, and a halo framing a fringe of white hair around a balding head. He is barefoot and wears a black monk’s robe, and wears or carries a coral-pink cloak. Closest to us, in front of the mouth of a dark cave, Saint Anthony embraces a light-skinned, bearded man with long, curly blond hair. That man wears cream-white robes and also has a halo. Two walking sticks lie on the ground at their feet. The pebble-lined path disappears between stylized trees painted with smooth dark brown trunks and canopies created with pine and spring-green dots over a ground of forest green. To our right and farther along the path as it rises along the ridge of a hill, Saint Anthony meets a centaur, which has the torso and head of a man and the body and legs of a horse. The centaur holds a palm frond, and Saint Anthony raises one hand. On the opposite side of the hill, in the distance to our left, Saint Anthony walks along the path with a walking stick, and his pink robe hangs over a second long stick slung over his shoulder. Trees running along the background come nearly to the top of the panel, but a sliver of sky is painted gold, and the top edge is punched or embossed with a decorative pattern. Pale red shapes beyond the trees could be a building, perhaps a church, rising in the distance.