The legend of the childhood of Mary, mother of Jesus, had been formed at a very early date, as shown by the apocryphal Gospel of James, or Protoevangelium of James (second – ​third century), which for the first time recounted events in the life of Mary before the Annunciation. The iconography ^[1] of the presentation of the Virgin that spread in Byzantine art was based on this source. In the West, the episodes of the birth and childhood of the Virgin were known instead through another, later apocryphal source of the eighth – ​ninth century, attributed to the Evangelist Matthew. ^[2] According to this account of her childhood, Mary, on reaching the age of three, was taken by her parents, together with offerings, to the Temple of Jerusalem, so that she could be educated there. The child ascended the flight of fifteen steps of the temple to enter the sacred building, where she would continue to live, fed by an angel, until she reached the age of fourteen. ^[3] The legend linked the child’s ascent to the temple and the flight of fifteen steps in front of it with the number of Gradual Psalms. ^[4] The image of so long a flight of steps does not in general appear in fourteenth-century Sienese painting, which instead follows other details of the narrative of the Pseudo-­Matthew: it describes the surprise of those present on seeing the infant girl spontaneously ascend the steps on her own and shows the high priest Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist (haloed), welcoming the child. ^[5] The other girls who are being brought up in the temple are represented in a separate zone. One endeavor to which Sienese painters, on the other hand, paid constant attention was that of expressing the splendor of Solomon’s Temple, generally represented as a grand and complex building. The importance of the event was further underlined by the presence of ever more numerous onlookers.

The painting now in the National Gallery of Art appeared in the London exhibition in 1928 as a work by Bartolo di Fredi, an attribution perhaps proposed by Bernard Berenson ^[6], who privately confirmed it in 1951. ^[7] William Suida and Fern Rusk Shapley accepted this opinion in their catalog of the Kress Collection (NGA 1956), commenting that “the attribution to Bartolo​ . . . ​is not likely to be doubted.” ^[8] That attribution was reaffirmed in the 1959 catalog of the Gallery and by Jaqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne (1965). ^[9] As early as 1951, however, Millard Meiss broke ranks, identifying the hand of Paolo di Giovanni Fei in the painting. ^[10] All the more recent literature, apart from the above-cited exceptions, recognizes Meiss’s proposal as correct, including Berenson’s own posthumous edition of Italian Pictures (1968). ^[11] Confirmation of the attribution came with the discovery that the panel now in Washington comes from Siena Cathedral; documents of 1398 – ​1399 record payments made to Paolo di Giovanni Fei that undoubtedly refer to this painting. ^[12] The various inventories of the cathedral later described it as “tauola dipenta colla Ripresentationi al Tempio di Nostra Donna et di sancto Pietro et di sancto Pauolo et di più altri sancti e sancte” (a painted panel with the Presentation of Our Lady and with Saint Peter and Saint Paul and many other saints). ^[13] It remained on the altar of the chapel of San Pietro at least until 1482 and probably until the early 1580s (see Provenance).

The composition of Paolo’s altarpiece ^[14] would have followed the scheme prescribed for the altarpieces of the various chapels in the cathedral, a church dedicated to the Virgin: namely, a scene representing a Marian feast at the center, flanked by full-length, standing saints in the lateral panels, including the titular of the altar. As we know from the example of other polyptychs ^[15] with a provenance from the cathedral, the saints were portrayed one on each side. Moreover, the polyptychs, in contrast to the present appearance of The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, were always enriched with gables comprising half-figure images of other saints above the main register. Though none of these components of Paolo’s altarpiece have yet been identified, there seems no reason to doubt their existence. ^[16]

The documents, therefore, not only confirm the attribution of the panel in the National Gallery of Art to Paolo di Giovanni Fei but also reveal that it is the fragment of a larger complex. It remains uncertain, however, whether Paolo was the sole author of the dispersed polyptych. According to another piece of documentary evidence dating to 1393, in fact, another painter, Bartolo di Fredi, received a payment “per la tavola d’altare di San Pietro che fa.” ^[17] According to some, this means that the execution of the polyptych had already begun in 1392 – ​1393, but for some reason Bartolo’s work was not completed. So the commission was then apparently transferred to Paolo. It was believed in the past that the lost laterals of our Presentation could be identified in two panels by Bartolo di Fredi representing Saint Peter and Saint Paul, but the hypothesis was then shown to be mistaken. ^[18] So, in this case, the problem of the collaboration between the two Sienese painters still remains open. ^[19]

Paolo’s painting in Washington has always met with a flattering reception from art historians. Millard Meiss (1951) hailed it as an “important panel”; Enzo Carli (1979), as one of the masterpieces of late-fourteenth-century Sienese painting (“uno dei capolavori della pittura senese del tardo Trecento”); while the Dutch expert on Sienese painting, Henk van Os (1990), described it as “a magnificent painting.” ^[20] Michael Mallory (1965) was the first to recognize its identity with the documented panel by Paolo di Giovanni Fei in Siena Cathedral. He also subjected it to a meticulous stylistic and iconographic analysis. He observed inter alia that “the series of spaces that the artist has opened up beyond the figures is more complex than anything that he attempted in the Nativity [that is, in the other polyptych by the artist similarly having a scene thronged with figures at the center, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena] or in the Visitation [that is, in the scene frescoed by Paolo in the church of San Francesco, also in Siena], and at the same time the architecture is rendered accurately enough so that we can understand the plan of this church with its polygonal apse and vaulted chapels.” The Washington Presentation, Mallory concluded, “is the most ambitious and successful Sienese painting of the late Trecento as regards interior setting.” ^[21]

To illustrate the scene of the entry of the child Mary into the temple, Paolo must have followed an illustrious model, now lost: the one painted by Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti as part of a Marian sequence on the facade of the Ospedale della Scala, opposite the cathedral, in 1335. ^[22] We do not know whether Paolo had been contractually obliged — ​​as Sano di Pietro would be a half-century later ^[23] — ​​to reproduce the Lorenzettian composition in his panel. Many elements that it holds in common with Sano di Pietro’s version of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana), ^[24] and with the many other variations on the theme produced by Sienese painters in the second half of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century, ^[25] do suggest that he followed the same prototype, albeit with some liberties. The model in question showed Mary at the top of the flight of stairs within an elaborate architectural structure, frontally placed, with one or two priests welcoming her. The child’s arms were humbly crossed over her breast, but she was shown looking backward towards her mother. Behind the priests, at the center, an altar with a golden ciborium (presumably intended to represent the Ark of the Covenant) could be glimpsed in the background, while further to the right was placed the group of girls who would be Mary’s companions during her years in the temple. Placed in the foreground to the left were Mary’s mother and a group of women, and on the other side a group of men including two elderly bearded Jews disputing with each other. ^[26] Another model that the artist must have had in mind in his work was The Presentation of Christ in the Temple ^[fig1] painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the altar of San Crescenzio in Siena Cathedral (now in the Uffizi, Florence). ^[27] In conformity with this latter work, Paolo gives the Temple of Jerusalem a different appearance from that seen in the various versions of the theme painted by other Sienese painters. Following the lost fresco on the hospital facade, those painters describe the temple as a circular-plan building, whereas Paolo shows it as an imposing Gothic ^[28] church with a nave and two aisles: an innovative feature that shows his intention — ​​and capacity — ​​to renovate the tradition.

Perhaps the most original aspect of his composition, however, is its color: in contrast to the mainly dark colors enlivened by large splashes of deep red proposed by his predecessors, Paolo has adopted an altogether brighter, sunnier palette to represent the light-flooded interior of the temple, its polygonal apse pierced by a ring of double-lancet windows, its blue-gray stonework articulated with pink stringcourses. The colors of the architecture are matched by those of the various groups of onlookers that throng the interior, almost all of them wearing light-colored clothing: salmon pink, light blue, sage green. On the other hand, Paolo is parsimonious in his use of brilliant colors such as cinnabar red. It should also be pointed out that in his scene the middle distance is as densely inhabited as the foreground; it contains not only the principal group of Mary and Zacharias but also the crowd of girls assembled in a kind of raised singing gallery at the right ^[fig2]. Other innovative features of Paolo’s scene are some apparently minor inventions, such as the two foreshortened heads closing off the back of the composition at either side — ​​the heads of young women standing in the background and craning their necks in order to better view the sacred event — ​​thus emphasizing the spaciousness of the scene. The detail — ​​as spontaneous as a snapshot — ​​of the kneeling woman seen from the back in the foreground to the left, half-hidden by the pillar against which the Solomonic column of the lost original frame would have been superimposed, develops a motif with which the painter had already experimented, for example in The Birth of the Virgin in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena. ^[29] The trouvaille of placing two children in the foreground, silhouetted against the light-flooded flight of steps, with the evident function of providing a kind of repoussoir, also anticipated a motif of which the International Gothic ^[30] painters of the following generation would be fond. Not even in this phase of his full maturity, however, was the painter apparently willing to forego the solemn, dreamy, and in general impenetrable facial masks that usually characterize his paintings. Yet he skillfully exploits the expressive potential of the large and nervous hands of his figures to express the resolution, wonder, or doubt of his protagonists. In conclusion, it can be said that the scene proposed by the painter epitomizes and at the same time renews the experiences of a whole century of Sienese figurative culture, projecting them towards what was about to be born in the new century.

The original wooden support, of an undetermined number of planks with vertical grain, was removed by William Suhr when the painting was transferred to hardboard and cradled ^[33] in 1954. ^[34] Photographs taken before this treatment show the painting in a nineteenth-century frame that follows the shape of the upper edge; since this format would have been most uncommon in a fourteenth-century altarpiece ^[35], it seems likely that the panel was cut out of a larger one of different shape, presumably provided with gables above. The wooden support may have been slightly cropped along all the edges. The panel was prepared with gesso ^[36] followed by red bole in areas to be gilded. The brocade fabrics were created using sgraffito. The gilded areas were elaborately tooled with twelve different punch marks. Incised lines were used to indicate the contours of the architecture and the placement of the figures. Infrared reflectography ^[37] at 1.5 to 2.0 microns shows underdrawing, which reveals that both the figures and the architecture were sketched in freely. ^[38] Paint was applied in the small, discrete brushstrokes typical of tempera, with green underpaint ^[39] in the flesh areas.

When the panel was stripped of its original frame, the two wooden columns that would have divided the composition into three parts were dismantled and lost; during their removal, the painted columns of the architectural setting, which the framing columns had partially covered, suffered damage in the areas of the bases and capitals . The paint layer in the areas beneath the two lateral arches is generally well preserved; that beneath the central arch is abraded, and scattered small losses there have been inpainted ^[40]. There are additional paint losses along the lower edge and to the right side of the left inner column. Lacunae are also present along a crack extending from the center of the lower edge to the left hand of the high priest. Suhr removed a discolored varnish and inpainted the panel when he transferred it in 1954. By 1996, the varnish and inpainting applied by Suhr had discolored. The painting was treated again between 1996 and 1998 to remove this discolored varnish and inpainting.