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This picture is one of a series of predella panels presenting the life of St Ansanus, the patron saint of Siena. These panels are evidence that the flowering of the Sienese Renaissance exerted but little influence over Giovanni di Paolo. It is not that he simply a conservative. A thorough examination of his works shows that he noticed some of the novel solutions of his contemporaries and did take over this and that from Sassetta and from Gentile da Fabriano, and among the Florentines perhaps even from Masolino and Paolo Uccello. Nonetheless in his works he always built a peculiarly individual world, scenes with a strained rhythm and complicated construction, which are closer in character to late Gothic painting in the North Italian artistic centres than to what Tuscan artists produced during his long life.
In his picture at Esztergom, too, he translated the ceremony of baptism almost into the language of ballet: the nimble Ansanus, shown with small hands and feet, turns in a dance step to face the three catechumens about to be baptized. Behind them the others are shown in a veritable pantomime, in the various ways of disrobing. The elegance of presentation mixed with a peculiar, wry grotesqueness and the splendid colours of this little scene put it in the first rank of the works by this master.
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