The Prophet Job

This panel was never meant to hang flat against a wall. In 1516 it stood in a marble niche in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata, in the chapel of the banker Salvatore Billi, turned at slightly more than a right angle to a central picture of Christ. With Isaiah facing it from the other side, the three panels read like a triptych left half open. Job holds up his scroll, and its Latin says, he shall be my saviour. The old patriarch had been a favourite figure in Florence in the 1490s, when the Dominican preacher Savonarola, who saw Job as a go-between for God and humankind, held the city's attention. The altarpiece was Fra Bartolomeo's last and most ambitious work. In the 17th century the three panels were sold to Cardinal Carlo de' Medici, and the two prophets hung in the Uffizi until after the Second World War.