An earlier manuscript for this book first took shape as a consideration of the life and career of the little-known fifteenth-century Sienese painter Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei, against the background of his involvement with the Fraternita di Santa Maria degli Angeli e Compagnia di San Francesco: a lay confraternity that was associated with the ‘frati minori’ of San Francesco in Siena. According to surviving records, Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei accepted a commission to fresco a chapel that was owned by that confraternity, but for some reason reneged on his contract and subsequently abandoned the project altogether.

My curiosity was raised as to why Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei should have been selected to work for what appeared to be one of the leading Franciscan confraternities in mid-fifteenth century Siena. This seemed even more puzzling in the light of evidence that two of Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei's better known contemporaries – Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro – were commissioned around the same time to carry out work for the same group of lay religious on the same site.

My initial research focussed on setting the fifteenth-century confraternity in the context of the earliest followers of Francis of Assisi in Siena and the groups of lay religious that were associated with the new conventual complex and basilica of San Francesco that began to rise just outside the city walls during the second half of the thirteenth century.

Amongst other things, I was intent on establishing where confraternity members met and how they furnished the spaces in which they assembled or gathered together to offer their religious devotions. One late sixteenth-century record stood out in that context. This document, which was drawn up in January 1578/9 and inserted in a register of what was increasingly referred to as the Compagnia di San Bernardino, concerned an old altarpiece of the Madonna which was at that date displayed on the lower floor of that confraternity's oratory on the ‘sacrato’ (the original open space or square) of the conventual church of San Francesco. According to the 1579 record, during restoration work it had been noted that an inscription on the altarpiece's frame had included the date 1277.