Small Panels, Great Stories: Hidden Treasurers of Renaissance Altarpieces

Fun online talk from the National Gallery looking at predella panels in the gallery from three altarpieces.

Marc Woodhead and Carlo Corsato did an excellent double act talking us through what a predella was, the base of an altarpiece which was usually decorated with small scenes to illuminate lives of the saints or stories told in the main section of the work.

They started by looking at Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna of the Swallow from 1490-92. The National Gallery has the whole altarpiece, including it’s frame, so it was a good way to show us how the predella worked. They took us through two panels in particular, the St George and the St Jerome, to show us how they told a whole story in a small picture. They even told us a story about St Jerome’s lion and a donkey that I’d never heard before!

They then moved on to two pictures where the gallery only has panel from the predella and not the full work using them to show how altarpieces have been broken up over the years. They looked at Duccio’s Maesta, from which the gallery has three small panels and the life of John the Baptist by Giovanni de Paolo. Again they talked us through the iconography of specific panels including the strange perspective in the Birth of John the Baptist, comparing it to a David Hockney!

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