The wall painting displayed within an important gilded frame in the Vanvitelliano Hall is the work of the ‘Maestro di Beffi’, a painter and miniaturist from Abruzzo who lived between the end of the 14th and the first half of the 15th century. The fresco came from San Trifone in Posterula, on today’s Via della Scrofa, since 1287 the Roman church of the Augustinian Order before the construction of St. Augustine’s. The detachment by tearing took place in 1736, during the demolition of San Trifone, to allow the extension of the convent designed by Luigi Vanvitelli.

Part of a larger figuration, on the throne with the back covered by a drape of honour, the fresco depicts a Madonna ‘of the tickle’, so called because of the delicate touch of the Virgin’s finger on the Child’s neck.

Regarding the dating, it is believed that the painting is slightly later than the pictorial decoration of the triumphal arch and the apsidal presbytery of San Silvestro in L’Aquila (c. 1405), but that the artist’s Roman experience predates the execution of the Beffi Triptych in the Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo, from the church of Santa Maria del Ponte in Tione (1410-1415).