Praglia Polyptych

In 1448 the Benedictine abbey of Praglia, in the hills south of Padua, joined the reformed congregation of Santa Giustina, and this altarpiece was ordered to mark the union. Benedict and his sister Scholastica are among the saints, the founders of the order the monks had just committed themselves to. That same year, in Padua, Antonio Vivarini and his brother-in-law Giovanni d'Alemagna signed for the Ovetari chapel alongside a teenager called Andrea Mantegna, who ended up painting most of it. Here the two of them kept to the older manner of gold ground and separate compartments. A great deal of that gold has gone, and the warm orange running across the surface is the clay bole that was laid down under the leaf. The polyptych left the abbey in 1811, when Napoleon's suppression of the monasteries sent it to Milan.