Retable de Pérouse

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar as well as a painter, and he made this for a family chapel in the church of San Domenico in Perugia, paid for by the Guidalotti. At the centre the Virgin sits enthroned with the Child, saints to either side in gold-ground panels, done around 1438 in the old polyptych format even as younger Florentines were chasing deep perspective. Its later history is the restless part. In the early 19th century the altarpiece was taken apart and scattered, and the small predella scenes from its base ended up in the Vatican, where they still are. What hangs in Perugia today was reassembled and reframed in 1915, with copies standing in for the panels that never came back.