The Boi Polyptych

On 25 April 1926 Castelvecchio opened as Verona's civic museum, and in that same year four local benefactors, among them the botanist and collector Achille Forti, bought this altarpiece and gave it to the new museum. It came from the Zanardi chapel in the church of San Pietro at Boi, a hamlet of Caprino Veronese at the foot of Monte Baldo.

The Virgin and Child sit enthroned among Saints James, Anthony Abbot, John the Evangelist and Christopher, inside the original carved frame in the flamboyant Gothic manner of the later 14th century. The donors are here too, a husband and wife whose faces and clothes are observed with a new curiosity about real people. The museum connects the panel with Altichiero, the leading Veronese painter of the time, and points to the latticework throne and its complicated perspective. It has never quite settled the question. Its own records have called the work circle of Altichiero, and today it is labelled attributed to him.