Retablo Barbadori y predela

Filippo Lippi took this commission in 1437 for a chapel in the church of Santo Spirito in Florence. It belongs to a moment when Florentine painters were dissolving the old gold-ground polyptych, with each saint boxed in his own compartment, into a single shared space. Here the Virgin and Child stand among angels while Saints Frediano and Augustine gather close, everyone sharing one room and one light. The altarpiece hung in Florence for centuries until 1810, when Napoleon's soldiers, suppressing the religious guilds, took it to France. After Napoleon fell it was not returned. The small narrative scenes from its base, the predella, did go home to Florence, so today the main panel stands in the Louvre in Paris while its footnotes hang in the Uffizi.