Artwork story
About Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness
The artist and artwork
Sano di Pietro painted Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness around 1440 in tempera and gold on a wood panel. The Met long attributed the work to the anonymous 'Osservanza Master' but now identifies that painter as the young Sano through documentary and stylistic evidence. The attribution still has a careful boundary: this panel and related works may have been made with one or more accomplished workshop associates. It was one episode in a larger painted cycle, not originally an isolated landscape.
The world around it
The painting belongs to early Renaissance Siena, still an independent Tuscan city with a powerful artistic identity. Sienese painters were confronting innovations from Florence while preserving the lyrical color, sacred storytelling, and decorative richness inherited from Duccio and later local masters. The eight-panel Saint Anthony cycle was probably commissioned by a member of the Sienese Martinozzi family for an Augustinian foundation in Siena or the Marches. Across medieval Europe, devotion to the fourth-century Egyptian hermit was also connected with hospitals and protection from the feared illness called Saint Anthony's fire.
A detail to notice
This was probably the sixth of eight small narrative panels arranged vertically around a central painted or sculpted Saint Anthony. Here the haloed hermit stands low at right, withdrawing his hands as a stony path winds past leafless trees, deer, rabbits, distant buildings, a boat, and birds beneath an extraordinary streaked dusk sky. The animals represent temptations, but the sharpest temptation is missing: a pot of gold once occupied the lower-left corner and was scraped away. Its physical removal gives the scene a second history. The worldly wealth Anthony resists has vanished from sight, while the saint, barren ground, luminous horizon, and seemingly innocent animals remain. What first looks like a quiet landscape is therefore a moral trial whose crucial object survives only through the damaged surface and the painting's documented story.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Tempera and gold on wood and held in the Robert Lehman Collection department.
Recorded dimensions include Overall: 18 3/4 × 13 5/8 in. (47.6 × 34.6 cm).
Subject terms include Deer, Landscapes, and Saints. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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