Polittico Demidoff

The name belongs to a Russian prince, not to the painter. Carlo Crivelli made these panels in 1476 for the high altar of San Domenico, a Dominican church in Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marche — saints standing stiff and jewel-bright against gold, in a manner already old-fashioned for its date. Centuries later Crivelli's work was broken up and sold off. In the 1800s the wealthy collector Anatole Demidoff bought a set of the panels and had them fitted into one grand new frame for the chapel of his villa near Florence, which is how the ensemble got his name. The National Gallery in London bought the assembly in 1868. Not everything shown together truly belonged together: the panels were later found to come from more than one Crivelli altarpiece, and the central Pietà now hangs across the ocean, in New York.