The Griffoni Polyptych Reborn in Bologna

Description

Created by Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de’ Roberti, the Griffoni Polyptych is one of the finest masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance.
This superb artwork, which once decorated the altar in Floriano Griffoni’s chapel at the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, was painted with exquisite colors and precious gold, and was originally housed in a monumental carpentry made by master woodcarver Agostino de’ Marchi of Crema. In the early eighteenth century, the altarpiece was dismantled to make way for new furnishings and its figurative portions were cut down to room-sized paintings, which during the nineteenth century were sold on the antiques market and dispersed among collectors.
The present volume investigates this complex work through a review of its historical and philological vicissitudes, which allowed to identify the authors and reconstruct the plausible organization of the panels within the altarpiece. The individual paintings today belong to the collections of nine prestigious museums: The National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, the Vatican Museums, the Cini Foundation in Venice, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara, and Villa Cagnola in Gazzada (Varese).