Pg. 79a: «THE VIRGIN AND CHILD OF S. DOMENICO IN SIENA. The reorganisation and success of lay confraternities at the Dominican house in Siena was due, in large part, to the activities of fra Ambrogio Sansedoni (1220?-1287). A member of a prominent family of Sienese bankers, Sansedoni was a powerful preacher and a major civic figure, a peace-maker in local disputes and instrumental in the removal, in 1273, of a papal interdict placed on Siena. As noted above, the introduction of the practice of singing laudi in congregations of the Virgin has been credited to him. The Dominican house in Siena was home to one of the largest thirteenth-century panel paintings of the Virgin and Child Enthroned (max. 362 x 194 cm, including gable; fig. 66). The painting, which returned to S. Domenico at the end of the twentieth century after more than a century on display in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (hence its name, 'Palazzo Pubblico Madonna', in earlier literature) is recorded in the church in the 1520s by Sigismondo Tizio. An earlier reference, found in an eighteenth-centuty transcription of the Sienese Agnolo di Tura Chronicle, mentions under the year 1221 that an altarpiece ('tavola d'altare') made in Siena, 'molto devota e bella', was placed in the church of S. Domenico on 17 December of that year. Although the status of the Agnolo di Tura Chronicle a mid-fourteenth century text has been called into question, some of its information has been shown to be reliable, and the specificity of its comments on the S. Domenico painting suggests access to early sources (...)».