The Crucifixion

This crowded Calvary once crowned a large altarpiece, set at the top in the middle, above a Virgin enthroned among angels. The altarpiece was later taken apart. The Madonna that stood below it is now in Ajaccio, in Corsica, in the museum founded on the bequest of Cardinal Joseph Fesch, Napoleon's uncle. A side panel with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian, which belonged to Fesch in Rome, is at Oberlin College in Ohio. The two panels that flanked this one, with Saint George, Saint Anthony Abbot, Saint Clare and the Franciscan martyr Blessed John of Perugia, are in the Vatican Pinacoteca. Those saints point to a Franciscan church in the territory of Perugia, where Boccati often worked.

He is recorded in Padua in 1448, and the hard, sculptural figures are read as the mark of what he saw there, so the panel is placed in the 1450s, after his return to Umbria. The haloes of the mourners at the foot of the cross carry their names, the Marys and Saint John the Evangelist. On the base of the frame an older label still names Taddeo di Bartolo, a Sienese painter of an earlier generation. It survives from a former attribution. Since Lionello Venturi published the panel in 1926, it has been given to Boccati without dispute.