San Cassiano Altarpiece

In August 1475 Pietro Bon, a Venetian nobleman, commissioned an altarpiece for the parish church of San Cassiano from Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian painter then working in Venice. On 16 March 1476 Bon wrote to the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who wanted Antonello for his own court, that the picture would be finished in 20 days and would be among the most excellent paintings in Italy and beyond.

Nobody knows when, or why, it was taken down and cut up. By the middle of the 17th century pieces of it belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and they appear as separate pictures in the Theatrum Pictorium, the illustrated catalogue of his Italian paintings that his court painter David Teniers published in 1660. For more than two centuries after that no one treated them as one work. In 1929 the Hungarian art historian Johannes Wilde recognised that three panels in the Vienna gallery belonged together.

What hangs here is his reconstruction. The Virgin and Child sit high on a throne in the centre, and on either side a cut-down piece shows four saints in half length, two to each side. The rest of the altarpiece, with further saints standing at full height, is lost.