In 1895, the Triestine physician Antonio Lorenzutti gave a precious fourteenth-century painted triptych with foldable wings on permanent loan to his local town museum. The object had been given to him by the Benedictine nuns of San Cipriano in Trieste, as a thank-you for the free medical services he had provided for their community over the years. In 1907, Lorenzutti’s family bequeathed the triptych to the municipality of Trieste; currently displayed in the Civico Museo Sartorio, it still forms part of the city’s art collections (Plate V).

Since its transition from female monastic clausura to museum context, the triptych has played an important part in the historiography of Venetian Trecento panel painting. Its wings, especially, believed to be early works by Paolo Veneziano, have received a considerable amount of attention, and have mostly been discussed in the context of his workshop production and artistic development. Most scholars now date the wings to c. 1328–30, and very plausibly argue that they were added to the slightly older central panel, painted c. 1300–20, in a second stage of development.

In addition, iconographic studies have mainly focused on the images depicted on the wings and linked them to the early history of the Benedictine nuns of San Cipriano in Trieste, from where the triptych emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Before moving to the premises of the church of San Cipriano in 1458, the community, then operating under the name of Santa Maria della Cella, went through a period of relative institutional fluidity. A ‘Cella dominarum Sancte Marie’, probably a semi-religious group, mentioned in the documents in 1265, was transformed into a monastic house by the Triestine bishop in 1278, and from at least 1282 belonged to the Ordo Sanctae Clarae, the female branch of the Franciscan Order as instituted by Pope Urban IV (r. 1261–64). This institutional shift – the reasons for which are unknown – caused serious differences between the community of Santa Maria della Cella and the Triestine bishop, which were only settled in the years around 1330. Maria Walcher Casotti suggested that the scenes on the triptych’s right wing, in particular the one in the middle register showing how Saint Clare and Saint Agnes present a group of young women to a bishop saint, may be connected to the community’s reconciliation with the Triestine Episcopal See.