The present painting is a significant new addition to Dosso Dossi’s corpus of early works. The canvas was painted by Dosso immediately after his first documented trip to Venice in 1516, as it is evidently influenced by contemporary Venetian painting, from the mature Giovanni Bellini to the young Titian.

The use of the black background, the caricatural transformation of the two saints (almost resembling two satyrs), are placing our canvas as a fundamental precedent to the Angelica and Orlando of Palazzo Pitti in Florence, dating from the same decade.