Asunción de la Virgen

Francesco Botticini painted this around 1475 for Matteo Palmieri, a Florentine statesman who kneels as a donor at the lower left, his wife opposite. Palmieri had written a long poem, the Città di Vita, that reworked Dante and suggested human souls were angels who had stayed neutral in heaven's old rebellion, sent down to earth to earn their way back. The Church read that as heresy. Suspicion fell on the altarpiece too, which was at one point hidden behind a veil, and at some stage the faces of Palmieri and his wife were scratched away in protest before later being restored. Above them, Botticini ranks the saints and the blessed in three tidy concentric tiers around the Virgin, who rises toward a waiting Christ at the top.