Poppi Altarpiece. Madonna in Glory with Saints

There is a date painted on the spiked wheel that Saint Catherine holds, near the middle of this altarpiece: 1540. It cannot be right. Andrea died in 1530, of the plague that followed the siege of Florence, and this was the work still on his easel. The abbey of San Fedele at Poppi, in the Casentino valley, had ordered it, and the account was settled in 1531 with his widow, Lucrezia. A painter called Vincenzo Bonilli, nicknamed Morgante, was brought in to finish it, and a restoration in 1986 established that he did very little, only final touches, so the picture on the wall is substantially Andrea's. The wheel and its date are most likely Bonilli's. It stayed at Poppi until 1818, when a grand duke of the house of Lorraine bought it for the collection here.