Christ Blessing

In 1483 a huge Flemish altarpiece arrived in Florence, painted by Hugo van der Goes for Tommaso Portinari, who ran the Medici bank's office in Bruges. Florentine painters looked hard at Northern pictures like it, and this small panel shows what they took away. A half-length Christ who blesses with one hand and holds the nails of the Crucifixion in the other is a type that Hans Memling and his followers painted again and again. The wound shows on the hand that grips the nails. Behind him the countryside opens onto three small crosses on a distant hill and a town of Northern-looking towers. Old inventories called it Rosso Fiorentino, then Perugino, and later scholars gave it to Mariotto Albertinelli. In 1969 Everett Fahy assigned it to Fra Bartolomeo, close in date to his Annunciation of 1497 in Volterra Cathedral.