Panels from the Altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin with Saints: The Assumption of the Virgin

Italian · 1450–75

Medium

Tempera and oil on panel

Original size

Panel: 125.8 × 40 cm (49 1/2 × 15 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This luminous altarpiece panel captures the Assumption of the Virgin in the refined, devotional spirit that defined mid-fifteenth century Italian religious painting — gold-saturated heavens, serene figures, and a compositional gravity that still commands attention six centuries later. Created by an unidentified Italian master working between 1450 and 1475, the panel reflects a pivotal transitional moment in Western painting. Artists of this period were beginning to layer oil glazes over traditional tempera grounds, a hybrid technique that allowed for greater depth and tonal subtlety than egg tempera alone could achieve. The result is a surface that feels simultaneously flat and luminous — icons that glow from within rather than simply reflecting light. The Assumption was among the most theologically charged subjects a painter could receive from a church patron, and altarpiece commissions of this scale were considered a painter's highest professional honour, often determining a workshop's reputation for a generation. Now held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the panel retains an intimacy that reproductions rarely convey — every brushstroke in the drapery and the celestial host is deliberate and unhurried. This hand-painted oil reproduction honours that same deliberateness, built up layer by layer on canvas to faithfully recreate the warm colouring, gilded accents, and meditative stillness of the original.