Resurrection of Christ

Around 1500 the Capponi, one of the leading families of Florence, owned a chapel they called Il Paradiso beneath the church of San Bartolomeo at Monteoliveto, just outside the city walls south of the Arno. They gave its altarpiece to Raffaellino, the painter who had grown up in their household. He showed Christ rising from the tomb, with the soldiers set to guard it thrown to the ground around him in twisted poses that recall Filippino Lippi and Leonardo. Vasari, writing half a century later, said that one of the heads was a portrait of the young Niccolò Capponi.

Behind the figures the painter put a view the family knew well, Florence itself, with the Arno and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. The panel left the church around 1800 and passed through the Uffizi before settling in the Sala del Colosso of the Accademia in 1950. A restoration of the panel and its carved, gilded frame began there in November 2020.