These scenes from the Old Testament occupied the context of a secular bridal chamber. The three panels are taken either from a chest, (a cassone) or a headboard, (a spalliera). Joseph resists an adulterous wife, while Susanna rebuffs a pair of leering old men: these role models thus offer the owners an example of impeccable conjugal behaviour. The depiction of the architecture of Antiquity structured according to the principles of perspective constitutes a new development in Sienese painting. However, the Gothic tradition remains present in the slender silhouettes of the characters, in the detailed vegetation and the rather unmodelled background landscape as Joseph is sold.

A military engineer, architect, painter and sculptor, Francesco di Giorgio Martini was an important Renaissance figure who has sometimes been compared to Leonardo da Vinci. He was typical of those Renaissance men of multiple talents and curiosities emblematic of the Quattrocento.

 Executed circa 1460, these three panels on themes from the Old Testament are among the artist’s youthful works. They certainly belong to two different destinations. Both Joseph's life episodes were designed to adorn a spalliera, a headboard, whose iconographic purpose was to set a moral example for the husband. The first scene tells of the episode where Joseph was sold as a slave to a caravan of merchants after being thrown into a well by his brothers, jealous of their father Jacob’s preference for him. In the second panel, Joseph refuses the advances of the wife of Potiphar, his Egyptian master. In revenge she accuses him of having tried to seduce her and Joseph is imprisoned.

The subject was popular from the mid-15th century, and served as an example of self-restraint addressed to husbands. For the bride, the cassone in the bridal chamber exemplified virtue. Here the subject is addressed via the story of the chaste Susanna. The biblical heroine is surprised while bathing by two lustful old men who threaten to denounce her as an adulteress if she refuses their advances. Only the wisdom of the prophet Daniel saves the honest Susanna from stoning.

Francesco di Giorgio Martini adapts the seriousness of the Florentine style to Sienese whimsy and its narrative vivacity. The rigour of the architectures of Antiquity determines a space dominated by an accurate perspective resulting in a single vanishing point. However, in the background of Joseph Sold by his Brothers, the hills resemble those of the aging Paolo di Giovanni. The artist rejects the intense colours of Gothic painting in favour of a more muted palette but retains the slender silhouettes of the characters, detailed vegetation and the unmodelled landscape in the background. As a student of Vecchietta and an adept of the Florentine social scene, he was receptive to the innovations of the day. He adopted a vocabulary influenced by Antiquity for his architecture and decor, while focusing on the representation of the female nude. The Sienese taste for precision and detail persists in the sculpted vegetation of the three panels.