Saint John the Evangelist

A polyptych like this was built to stand as one thing, so it is a little strange that this saint now hangs on his own. The tall, narrow shape is the giveaway: about 114 centimeters high and only 38 wide, it once held a single standing figure at the side of an altarpiece by Antonello da Messina, with an enthroned Madonna at the center. At some point the altarpiece was sawn into its separate compartments, and the pieces went their own ways for centuries. They resurfaced only in the 1990s. In 1995 the matching Saint Benedict panel came up at an auction in Milan, and the year after, the Uffizi acquired this John the Evangelist together with the Madonna. What survives is three compartments, from an altarpiece that may originally have had five.