Cristo in cielo con quattro santi e un donatore

This altarpiece was finished around 1492, the year Lorenzo the Magnificent died in Florence and Columbus set sail, a moment when the confident world of Ghirlandaio's workshop was quietly running out. Ghirlandaio himself had only two years left to live. The commission came from a Camaldolese abbot named Giusto Bonvicini, who had himself painted kneeling in the lower corner in the white habit of his order, small and reverent beneath the saints. Above them all Christ sits enthroned on a bank of cloud, every fold of drapery and every gaze angled to steer your eye upward to him. The two women kneeling in front are local saints, shown from behind in bright red so that the townspeople of Volterra would have recognised their own protectors at once.