Allegory of the Immaculate Conception

Around 1540 Giorgio Vasari was painting for the monks of Camaldoli, the hermitage high in the forests of the Casentino, east of Florence, when a Florentine banker based in Rome turned up there. Bindo Altoviti had come to secure timber for the building works of the new Saint Peter's. The two men met, and out of that meeting came an important commission, an altarpiece of the Immaculate Conception for the Altoviti chapel in the church of Santi Apostoli in Florence. Vasari delivered it in 1541, and the design pleased so much that he repeated it. This panel, more than three metres tall, is one of those repeats, made around the same time, and the scholar Paola Barocchi counted it as probably the third version. Mary floats above, held up by angels and treading on the Evil One with her right foot, while Adam and Eve sit naked in the foreground, prisoners of the first sin. The panel probably came from the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, Vasari's home town, and it has travelled since. The Italian state bought it in 1895, sent it to the national museum in Arezzo in 1928, and brought it back to Rome in 2020.