Madonna in Glory

The bearded old man in black at the front, gazing up, is the man who paid for it. Francesco Gherardini had this altarpiece made for the church of San Francesco at Lendinara, a small town on the flat country near Rovigo, inland from Venice. Below the Virgin and Child in the clouds stand the saints the Franciscans there would have wanted, Francis himself, Bonaventure in cardinal red, Anthony of Padua with his lily, and the young Louis of Toulouse kneeling with a bishop's mitre set down beside him. Then the church sold it. The canvas went under the hammer in 1798, passed through Italian private hands, and was bought from a Venetian dealer by a French collector, Alfred Chaber, who gave it to Narbonne in 1876. The museum there, in the old archbishops' palace, still lists it as attributed to Tintoretto rather than certainly from his own hand.