Virgin and the Dead Christ with the Ascension and Saints

In 1485 the island of Rab, off the Croatian coast, had been ruled by Venice for more than 70 years, and the altarpiece for the Benedictine nuns' church of St Andrew there came from the city itself. Bartolomeo Vivarini signed it on the base of the carved Pietà at the centre, made in Venice by Bartolomeo Vivarini of Murano, 1485, and the whole thing, carving, panels and Gothic frame, was shipped down the Adriatic. Around the dead Christ in his mother's lap stand Jerome, Gregory, Mary Magdalen, Christopher, Andrew and George, with Benedict and his sister Scholastica at the two outer edges, the founders of the nuns' own order. It stood on their altar for almost four centuries. In 1876 the convent, by then short of money, sold it. On Rab the story is told that the money went to repair the convent roof. The altarpiece was taken to Venice and sold there, and a copy was set up in its place. The Boston collector Quincy Adams Shaw lent it to the young Museum of Fine Arts and gave it outright in 1901. The copy still stands in the church of St Andrew on Rab.