L'Assomption de la Vierge

This altarpiece was painted for a small Florentine church, San Miniato tra le Torri, under a commission recorded on 20 November 1449. The church itself is gone. It was pulled down around 1888 to make way for the city's main post office, and its contents scattered, which is how a Florentine Assumption came to be in Berlin. The two saints flanking the Virgin belonged to that lost corner of Florence: Julian with his sword, and Minias, the martyr whose name the church carried. Mary rises from her stone tomb inside a bright almond of light, lifted by four angels. Castagno models her heavy blue cloak with the deep light and shadow he was known for, so the fabric reads almost like carved stone rather than cloth.