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This panel, originally attributed to Simone Martini, was discovered in Naples in 1904. As early as 1906 this attribution was already contested and the painting was reassigned to a variety of different painters in the circle of Martini; among them Naddo Ceccarelli, Lippo Memmi, and Donato Martini. At the same time, a number of art historians supported the attribution of the work to Simone Martini.
More recently, scholars have agreed in assigning it to a close collaborator of Martini, an anonymous master who takes his eponym from this painting , which was formerly kept in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome (The Master of Palazzo Venezia). This panel was once the central element of a polyptych, to which a St Peter and Mary Magdalene at the National Gallery in London are also considered to have belonged. The reconstruction of the career and artistic personality of this painter has shed light on the artist's exquisite transposition of Simone Martini's formal vocabulary. The dating of the piece has been assigned to some time after the anonymous master's 1333 Annunciation (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), perhaps when Simone had already left for Avignon.
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