Virgin and Child, The Annunciation to Joachim, and The Meeting at the Golden Gate, ca. 1493 – 1494

About the Work

Early Italian altarpieces had consisted of a large number of individual, rigidly joined panels. Each normally depicting only a single saint, they were arranged according to the relative status of those subjects. Only in the second half of the fifteenth century did the separately framed panels come to be linked by a depiction of the ground or background continuing from one to the next. Macrino d’Alba’s tripartite retable – featuring the enthroned Virgin with a scene from the story of Joachim and Anna on either side – adheres to this more modern scheme.