The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas

Gozzoli spent roughly the last 25 years of his career in Pisa, covering the walls of the Camposanto, the cemetery beside the cathedral, with scenes from the Old Testament. This tall panel from the early 1470s belongs to those Pisan years. In the middle Thomas Aquinas sits enthroned with his books open, flanked by Aristotle and Plato, the two pagan philosophers whose ideas he worked into Christian theology. At his feet lies Averroes, the 12th-century scholar from Córdoba whose reading of Aristotle Thomas had argued against. Above, Christ appears with Saint Paul, Moses and the Evangelists. Below, churchmen sit in council under a pope. The panel stayed in Pisa until 1813, when it was taken to Paris during the Napoleonic seizures of Italian art. It was not among the works sent back after 1815, and it has hung in the Louvre ever since.