\paperw19995 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 Italian painter. \par
We know nothing of his training, but it can be linked to the influence of the great masters of early
fourteenth-century Sienese painting from Simone Martini to Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. His painting was then brought up to date by his contact with the trends of International Gothic and his investigations of perspective and naturalism conducted in F
lorence. His earliest known work is the \i Wool Guild Polyptych\i0 (1423-26). This was followed by the \i Polyptych of the Madonna della Neve\i0 (1430-32), the \i Cortona Polyptych\i0 (ca. 1433), and the great double-sided altarpiece at Borgo San Sepo
lcro (1437-44). All these works, except the last, have been dismembered and divided between various museums. He was the greatest Sienese painter of the time, a highly sensitive interpreter of the early fifteenth-century culture in which the subtleties of
description and tender humanity of the late Gothic were merged with new rules of perspective.
