Madonna and Child with the Blessing Christ, and Saints Mary Magdalene and Catherine of Alexandria with Angels [entire triptych]

_Pietro Lorenzetti of Siena painted me in 1340_. This inscription is the signature of the Sienese painterPietro Lorenzetti (Sienese, active 1306 - 1345), which survives on a fragment of the original frame (now incorporated in a modern support and located beneath the image of Madonna and Child, with the Blessing Christ [middle panel]). While Pietro and his brother Ambrogio are often noted for the inventive ways in which they defined three-dimensional space and incorporated details from everyday life to expand the realism of their figures and settings, they also painted icon-like devotional pictures, such as these. During this period, Pietro seems to have been especially influenced byGiotto (Florentine, c. 1265 - 1337), as seen in the quiet solemnity of the composition, in which a massive figures fill nearly the entire panel. The figures' clothing also typifies Giotto's style: heavy fabrics fall perpendicularly in a few simplified or pointed folds to emphasize the figures' solidity.

The central group of Madonna and Child, with the Blessing Christ [middle panel] proposes an unusual variant of the _Hodegetria_ Madonna type, which can be found in a number of the Galleries paintings of this period (the Byzantine Enthroned Madonna and Child__ and Lippo Memmi’s Madonna and Child with Donor__ are just two). The Christ child is supported on his mother’s left arm and looks directly at the observer, but Mary does not point to her son with her right hand, as is typical, and instead offers him cherries. It is thought that this painting may have been commissioned for a church not in Siena but in Pisa, where apparently the motif of the Christ child eating cherries was then popular.