The saint in a white habit holding a book and a crosier has been identified as St. Benedict (although we cannot rule out the possibility that it may be St. Bernard of Clairvaux), while the younger saint holding a sword may be identified as St. Galganus (Tambini, 1982). This small panel may have been part of a painting situated in Tuscany, given that the artist never worked outside the region, and may well have been intended for a Camaldulese or Cistercian establishment, because when St. Benedict is portrayed in a white (rather than a dark) habit, it is usually in a picture commissioned by one of those two orders (G. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting, Florence 1952, p.145).
Writing in 1957, Antonio Archi attributed the two saints to the early 14th-century Sienese school, in particular to the circle of Simone Martini. The panel was subsequently analysed in 1982 by Anna Tambini, who published it under the name of Niccolò di Segna on the strength of a vocal communication from Carlo Volpe.
In the two saints, whose faces continue to echo the style of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the decoration of the haloes with a flower-pattern punch on a granite ground, which is fairly simple for
Niccolò’s style, is likely to be due to the panel’s small format. We find this kind of decoration chiefly in the artist’s earlier work, such as the Crucifixion in the Keresztény Múzeum in Esztergom or St. Catherine, St. Mary Magdalen and St. Margaret in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, which may be dated to some time between 1325 and 1330 (inv. 3113).
The expedient of the trees used to separate the saints is by no means commonplace and, as Anna Tambini pointed out in 1982, it may well reflect such coeval models as the plant stems in the central panel of Simone Martini’s Polyptych of the Blessed Agostino Novello or a side pilaster in the triptych by Pietro Lorenzetti now in the Abegg-Stiftung in Riggisberg. The position of the figures facing right in the Faenza panel (which clearly appears to be a fragment) tells us that the series of figures in the missing part of the work extended further in that direction.
The panel’s rather poor condition and the paint drops are due, in part at least, to unduly aggressive cleaning before the painting entered the Pinacoteca. In the lower part of the panel, we can still see the painting’s plaster primer, with a thin golden line confirming that the saints were designed from the outset to be seen in a half-length pose, their height similar to that of the figures in Polyptych no. 38, also by Niccolò di Segna (1330-5) and now split between the Museo Horne in Florence (inv. 58), the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena (inv. 24, inv. 38), the Galleria Cini in Venice (inv. 6677), the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon (inv. D 23 A-B), the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa and a number of private collections (see. N. Matteuzzi, Niccolò di Segna e suo fratello Francesco: pittori nella Siena di Duccio, di Simone e dei Lorenzetti, Florence 2018, pp.112-114).
If the wood grain is vertical, as it would appear to be to the naked eye, then the panel most probably comes from a small diptych intended for private devotion (vocal communication from Andrea De Marchi).
