Madonna and Child with Saints Liberale and Francis (The Castelfranco Madonna)

A title that names its saints

Most titles in this catalogue that gather saints around a Virgin decline to name them — 65 of the 611 use the plural and leave the identification to the objects. This one names both. Liberale is a soldier saint, and the convention gives soldier saints armour and a banner; Francis of Assisi is given a roped habit and the stigmata, wounds that cannot be held and therefore have to be shown on the body. Two saints, two entirely different kinds of sign: one worn as equipment, one carried as an injury.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1505 and gives the Duomo di Castelfranco Veneto, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy as its location. The dimensions are 200 x 152 cm, a large upright. It is filed under portraiture, Religion and religious cultural heritage, with High Renaissance as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour families are brown and yellow.

Still in a church

The location field here is not a museum. Of the 611 works in this catalogue, only a small number record a church, abbey or basilica as the place that holds them; the rest are in public collections or unrecorded. An entry that names a cathedral is recording something about the work's function as well as its address — an altarpiece indexed at the site it was made for is being described in the position the attribute system was designed to be read from: at distance, from a floor, by people who need the objects to do the naming.