Disputation on the Incarnation

For three years, until 2024, visitors to Brera could watch this altarpiece being cleaned where it hangs. It is more than four metres tall and too big to move, so the restorers worked on it in the gallery, in front of whoever walked past. Under the yellowed varnish they found the colour Girolamo Genga actually used, and the pouncing marks where he transferred a full-scale drawing onto the panel. They also changed what the picture is called. Generations of catalogues named it a Dispute on the Immaculate Conception. The art historian Corinna Gallori, reading it against the theology of the Augustinian friars who ordered it in 1513, argued that the doctors of the church below are arguing about the Incarnation, the moment Christ was conceived in the Virgin. The label you read now says so. Genga painted it for the high altar of Sant'Agostino in Cesena and signed himself, at the time, as a painter working in Florence.