Coronation of the Virgin, Dead Christ and Saints (Montelparo Polyptych)

In 1466 Montelparo was a small walled town in the hills of the southern Marche, and for this altarpiece it looked across the Apennines to a painter from Foligno, in Umbria. He signed it Nicholas Fulginas, Nicholas of Foligno, and dated it. The museum points out how much the picture owes to Venetian art, whose influence reached these towns along the Adriatic. Two years later Carlo Crivelli, a Venetian, signed his first dated altarpiece at Massa Fermana, in the same hills.

The polyptych is almost three metres high and nearly as wide, and its rich Gothic frame holds a crowd. At the centre Christ and his mother share a single throne as he sets a crown on her head. Above them the dead Christ stands in his tomb, with angels weeping behind him, and saints fill the panels on either side, tier upon tier.

It was probably painted for the church of Sant'Agostino. After the earthquake of 1703 it was moved to San Michele Arcangelo, inside the old castle walls of Montelparo, and in 1844 it was bought by Pope Gregory XVI, the same pope who had opened the Vatican's Etruscan and Egyptian museums a few years earlier.