The Ascension

The Acts of the Apostles tell the Ascension briefly. The risen Christ is taken up before the apostles until a cloud hides him, and two men in white appear and ask why they stand there gazing at the sky. By Barnaba's time painters had a familiar pattern for the scene, with Christ in an almond-shaped glory above and his mother at the centre of the group below.

Barnaba, painting in the early 1370s, rearranged it. Mary is placed at the right edge instead of in the middle, with a woman leaning in to speak to her, and the angel who admonishes the apostles has been set on a hill above their heads. Even the tip of Christ's glory is cut off by the top of the panel.

The panel is under 60 centimetres high. It belonged to Giulio Sterbini, a Roman collector of early Italian painting whose gallery the art historian Adolfo Venturi catalogued in 1906, and the Capitoline bought it from that collection in 1936.