Touching the Passion: Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces Through the Eyes of Faith

He was, in fact, a sophisticated artist, who produced refined religious imagery, from large altarpieces to small devotional paintings.

Two monumental altarpieces, an intricate series of panels from his Silver Chest (Armadio degli Argenti), a precious triptych for private devotion, and nine predella scenes join the four reliquaries in a dramatic installation evocative of their Renaissance context.

The 17th-century main and side retablo or altarpieces of Santuario de San Pedro Bautista in San Francisco del Monte, Quezon City, has fallen victim to the gilding craze sweeping over the Spanish colonial churches of the Philippines in the past years, heritage advocates say.

The nearly contemporary Gardner Museum fresco of Hercules was not included, although it must be acknowledged that it would have been out of place given the focus on sacred altarpieces here.

Also notable is the way that Barocci relates his altarpieces to the altars over which they were placed and to the sacrament enacted there.

In the wake of this upheaval, several altarpieces were transferred to museums including the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

The best account of the arrangement of altarpieces and other church furniture in the Carmini prior to the canonization of de' Pazzi is gathered from the Apostolic Visitation conducted in 1581 (preserved in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano) and from contemporary printed guidebooks to the city of Venice, which describe the Carmini as one of the city's many attractions.

The spotlighting is differentiated in this show, so the illumination is substantially more intense on the Paris painting, serving to soften the coloristic and tonal disjunction between the two altarpieces. (The exhibition's curator, Luke Syson, and his designers have also sensibly avoided putting the paintings directly beside each other.)

Bastiano Mainardi; painter of altarpieces in Renaissance Tuscany.

Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni.

Not surprisingly, many of the essays focus on the sorts of works one expects to associate with this theme: altarpieces, paintings, and the like, the sort of big-statement works that have survived the centuries.