Gambassi Altarpiece. Madonna and Child in Glory with Saints

The man who paid for this was not a bishop or a banker. He was a glassmaker from Gambassi, in the hills south-west of Florence, called Domenico, known to everyone as Becuccio the glass-blower, and he was a friend of the painter. Andrea put him and his wife into the predella, the strip of small pictures that ran along the base of the altarpiece, as two round portraits in working clothes. That predella was broken up long ago. The two roundels have been in Chicago since the 1960s, and it took research in the 1980s to work out who the sitters were. The gallery dates the altarpiece to 1527 or 1528. Some scholars push it back two or three years, on the grounds that Becuccio is thought to have died in the plague that hit Tuscany in the summer of 1527. Among the saints are Roch and Sebastian, the two the sick prayed to.