Descent to Limbo

Bronzino finished this tall panel in 1552 for a merchant, Giovanni Zanchini, who owned a chapel just inside the door of Santa Croce in Florence. It shows the moment between Christ's death and resurrection, when he descends to free the righteous who had died before him. Bronzino filled the lower half with muscular, half-clothed figures, and at its unveiling the work was admired. A generation later the mood had shifted. By 1584 a critic complained that the naked women were too alluring for a church, exactly the objection the Counter-Reformation was starting to make. Worked in among the crowd are the faces of Florentines the painter knew. In November 1966 the Arno flooded Santa Croce and this panel stood in the water, badly damaged. It was restored over years, rejoined with its base panel that had been lost until 2003, and in 2014 moved up to the refectory, out of the river's reach.