The Immaculate Conception with Saint Anselm and Saint Martin

When Crespi painted this altarpiece, sometime between about 1730 and 1737, the Benedictine monks of San Sisto in Piacenza still owned the most famous picture in their city, the Madonna that Raphael had made for their church two centuries before. Some two decades later they sold the Raphael to Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and in 1754 it left for Dresden. Crespi's canvas stayed in the church until 1803, when Piacenza was under French control and the painting was removed and taken to France.

The two saints suit a Benedictine house. Anselm, a monk who rose to be archbishop of Canterbury, was long credited with spreading the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Mary was free from original sin from the moment she was conceived. Martin of Tours, the Roman soldier who became a bishop, founded some of the first monasteries in Gaul. In France the canvas, more than two metres tall, spent 80 years on loan to the Château de Compiègne, from 1874 to 1954.