Polittico della Cervara

A Genoese nobleman named Vincenzo Sauli ordered this altarpiece in 1506 for the high altar of a Benedictine abbey on the Ligurian coast, and the Flemish master Gerard David painted the whole thing far away in Bruges before it was shipped south and set up in 1507. It was one of the largest Netherlandish altarpieces ever made, seven panels arranged around a central Madonna. Then in 1797 the Republic of Genoa suppressed the monastery, and the polyptych was taken apart and sold off piece by piece. What the Metropolitan holds are two of those fragments, the angel and the Virgin from an Annunciation that once sat at the very top. Other panels ended in the Louvre and back in Genoa, and the whole work stood reassembled together only once again, briefly, in 2005.