Word: predella
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...able to see it, given the relative lack of interest in the 15th century. It is, in a way, a show for escapists -- for what could be more pleasant than to flee the brutish realities of modern life for the enameled, fictive grace and small harmonious scale of these predella fragments and miniatures by Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo and Girolamo da Cremona...
...This is seen in the six predella panels the Met has reunited from his early masterpiece: an altarpiece for the Wool Guild of Siena. The clarity and measure of the green architectural frame, with its slender columns and bladelike ribs, in which the theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas kneels in prayer, is like a visual gloss on his own syllogisms. An educated Sienese would have known that Aquinas had the habit of praying before he wrote. In another panel Sassetta showed Aquinas asking Christ what he thought of his book on the nature of the Eucharist, and receiving the approval...
...those years, anything went. To eke out their meager stipends, parish priests could (and did) sell a 14th century predella out of the back door of their church for a few lire. The art market was full of floating masterpieces at whose origins dealers winked. The outstanding picture in the bequest, Sassetta's Our Lady of the Snow, is arguably the greatest surviving work by this unprolific Sienese master and worth, according to a spokesman at Christie's, "about $1,500,000." But it was stolen 60 years ago from the high altar of the church at Chiusi...
...small scenes Fra Angelico painted in translucent colors for the predella (base) of the Cortona Annunciation are each in themselves small hymns of praise to the Virgin. A small section in the panel of Mary's Visit to Elizabeth (see p. 34) made art history. It is the first identifiable landscape in Italian painting, a view of Lake Trasimeno as seen from Cortona...
...work: a dramatic series of three small (the largest, 19¼ by 25 in.) panels from a 15th century altarpiece showing Christ's Agony in the Garden, The Betrayal of Christ and the Procession to Calvary. Together the three paintings make up the only Sassetta predella (i.e., a strip of paintings along the base of the altar), in the U.S., and it was something that took the museum almost 30 years to acquire...