格拉齐耶多联画

In 1500 a Bergamo merchant named Martino Grassi left 500 ducats to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, money set aside to pay for a grand altarpiece over the high altar. The commission went to Vincenzo Foppa, by then the grand old man of Lombard painting, in his seventies. What he built was a tall, many-panelled structure heavy with gold, the Madonna and rows of saints stacked above one another. It stood over that altar for three centuries. Then, when Napoleon's government suppressed the religious houses, the polyptych was pulled apart and scattered. Only some of the panels survive, and they hang today in Milan's Brera. The carved frame around them is not the original. It was made after 1896 to hold what was left.