After a vision of three nails she carved one from olive wood — and it became her sign.
Aldobrandesca Ponzi was born at Siena in 1245 into a noble family and married to a cultivated and pious man, Bindo Bellanti. They had no children and the marriage was short: widowed at about thirty, she had him honourably buried at San Domenico, then took the habit of the Humiliati tertiaries beside the church of San Tommaso and had herself enclosed there. There she had visions — the Crucified between the Virgin and John, then an angel showing her three bloodied nails. After that one she carved from olive wood a great nail in their likeness, and that nail became her sign. Miracles were credited to her in her lifetime, among them water changed to wine for a labourer. She spent her last years in solitude, penance and prayer — tradition also credits her with nursing the sick in the hospital of her city — and died on 26 April 1310, aged sixty-five. Her body was disputed between the Humiliati and the parish priest of Sant'Andrea; the bishop decided for the friars, who buried her beneath the altar of the Virgin. She was taken up again in 1489 and placed in a casket that painters adorned with four scenes of her life.
A tertiary in dark habit holding a great olive-wood nail; by extension the three nails of the Passion. A painted cycle attributed to Guidoccio Cozzarelli, after 1489.