The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple

In 1518 a new project brought together three Sienese painters, Sodoma, Beccafumi and Girolamo del Pacchia. The new project was a scheme of fresco paintings to embellish the interior of a meeting room belonging to one of the city's oldest confraternities - the Confraternity of Santa Maria degli Angeli della Veste Nera (Saint Mary of the Angels and of the Black Robes). Founded in honour of the Virgin after 1450 the confraternity also adopted Bernardino as one of their saints, adding his name to the confraternity's title. For this reason the room that painters decorated is now known as the Oratory of San Bernardino. Designed as a place where the members of the confraternity would meet to conduct both their collective devotions and their administrative business, the Oratory of San Bernardino offers a rare example of an early sixteenth-century decorative ensemble that has survived in almost its original form.

On the side walls of the room there is a series of large-scale fresco paintings separated from one another by pilasters decorated with candelabra motifs. The paintings consist of narrative scenes from the life of the Virgin. Sodoma had been assigned the paintings of the Presentation of the Virgin and the Coronation.

In his painting of the Presentation, Sodoma introduced many of the lavishly attired bystanders that are characteristic of his Monteoliveto frescoes. The architectural setting for the scene, however, appears to have been influenced by Raphael's fresco of the Expulsion of Heliodorus (1512) in the Stanza d'Eliodoro in the Vatican. The paintings depicts two sets of marble colonnades seen in sharp recession, thus providing a framework and focus for an important event taking place at some distance from the spectator. In the case of the confraternity painting, this is the crucial encounter between the young child and the High Priest at the high altar, which forms the focal point of the story of the Virgin's presentation in the Temple.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 22 minutes): Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata, BWV 82