Holy Conversation

Macrino d'Alba spent most of his working life in Piedmont, yet his early reputation among critics rested largely on this panel, because it was here on the Capitoline. Those who studied it in Rome took him for a follower of the painters of Tuscany and Umbria. The Virgin and Child are enthroned between two bishop saints, Nicholas of Myra and Martin of Tours, both churchmen of the 4th century, on a panel nearly one and a half metres high.

Its date has moved with the scholarship. Older catalogues placed it around 1492 or 1493, and the museum now dates it to 1495 or 1496. It did not arrive with the papal purchases of the 1740s that founded this picture gallery. The Capitoline bought it in 1825, from a private collection.