Like many artists of the 1400s, especially in Siena, the artist known as the Master of the Osservanza was both a panel painter and a manuscript illuminator. Scholars named him for a triptych in a church just outside of Siena. The Church of the Osservanza, which is Italian for observance, was named for a reform movement among Franciscan friars trying to return to the purity of Saint Francis's ideal
