ANDREA DEL SARTO
(b. 1486, Firenze, d. 1530, Firenze)

Assumption of the Virgin

1526-29
Oil on wood, 379 x 222 cm
Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

This large altarpiece, called Assunta Passerini, represents the miracle of the Assumption of the Virgin. The subject illustrates an ancient tradition, according to which Mary, being deprived of original sin, is the only one to be welcomed in heaven with the body and with the soul.

Adapting the project he had previously developed for the Assunta Panciatichi, also at the Palatine Gallery, Andrea del Sarto proposes the typical iconographic scheme of the Renaissance, in which the scene of the assumption and that of the apostles are depicted together, on two levels. In the group of the apostles, we can identify St Nicholas and St Margaret, both kneeling, in the foreground. Looking towards the public, the first one wears a pink silk cope and is accompanied by the episcopal mitre, a book and the three golden spheres of the dowry which he gave to three poor young girls (his traditional attributes); St Margaret da Cortona is portrayed as a Franciscan tertiary, with a habit and a white veil. The presence of these two saints is explained by the commissioning of the painting: the altarpiece was in fact requested by Margherita Passerini between 1526 and 1528 for the high altar of Santa Maria dei Servi in Cortona. Both the father and the prematurely departed son of Margaret were called Nicholas, whose saint of reference is St Nicholas.

The altarpiece combines clarity and dimness, substance and dissolution, reality and vision, in a manner that suggests some of the development of the Italian Baroque that would follow in the seventeenth century.




© Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx.