The two small panels with Santa Chiara and Santa Elisabetta come from the deposits of the National Art Gallery of Siena. The small size and the particular gold background in which the figures are embedded make it possible to suppose that they were part (together with other figures, only partially recovered) of the decoration of the pillars of a large polyptych. The decision to present these two fragments in the exhibition stems from the desire to enhance above all an ancient iconography of Saint Clare, to be compared to the image of another woman of the Franciscan family, Elizabeth of Hungary.

the Breviarium sancta Clarae is a medieval manuscript of almost three hundred papers kept in the convent of San Damiano, in Assisi: a composite breviary-missal, in which the various parts are mixed up and not always easy to reconstruct. There are texts for the Liturgy of the Hours, enriched by a well-kept psaltery and hymns embellished with musical notation, texts for the Mass, with the proper and common ones of the feasts of the saints, the Office of the dead. There are also passages from the Vita Prima by Tommaso da Celano, for the office of Saint Francis, and the Regola stamped of 1223. From textual elements (the absence or reference to some feasts, the presence or absence of some prayers) or palaeographic, scholars have been able to date the codex between 1230 and 1234.

These are some of the oldest documents in the archive of S. Apollinare, which testify to the events of the foundation of the Milanese monastery - which took place in 1223 - and its very first years of life, such as the purchase of land near the church of S Apollinare where the monastery would have been built (parchment n. 1), the donation of the church by the archbishop Enrico Settala (parchment n.2) and the letters issued to the abbess and nuns by the popes Honorius III (parchment n.4 ) and Gregory IX (parchment n. 7 and n. 15). It should be emphasized that in these documents the nuns of S. Apollinare are mentioned with various denominations. The reference to their belonging to the rule followed by Saint Clare and her sisters in s. Damiano di Spoleto - from which Damianite -, is found in one of the first documents (from 1223) and then repurchased starting from the mid-thirties of the thirteenth century. In the intervening decade, however, they are referred to as the poor sisters residing in Milan according to the rule of the Order of Spoleto ("pauperes sorores Mediolani commoranes secundum regulam ordini Spolitani"), and then again as the poor sisters of the monastery of S Maria a S. Apollinare ("pauperes sorores monasteri beate Marie ad Sanctum Apollinarem") or of the order of poor cloistered nuns ("ordo pauperum monialium reclusarum"), where the qualifying and most significant element is the absolute poverty of life.

The painting reached the Civic Museums of Pavia in 1892 through the legacy of GC Francesco Reale, coming from the Pavia monastery of the Poor Clares of S. Chiara la Reale. It was a foundation of Bianca Maria Visconti that the duchess wanted to be built near the church of S. Francesco, keeping close the two forms of consecrated life, male and female, born from the experience of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi. The monastic complex included the church of the Annunciata of which there is no longer a trace.

The subject of Gentile da Fabriano's youthful panel confirms the provenance of the sisters of Saint Clare from the monastery and emphasizes the closeness of the second Order (the Poor Clares) to the first Franciscan Order (the friars who observe the Rule of Saint Francis of 'Assisi). The small poplar panel, painted in tempera and gold, bears the iconography of the Madonna and Child seated in an elevated position as if on a throne of clouds, between Saints Francis and Clare.