What can an altarpiece's shape and size suggest? What do its subjects represent? This painting, made for the high altar of a Florentine church, reveals the specific interests of audience, patron, and artist.
Architecture of a Painting
High Altar
This altarpiece measures more than eight feet wide and almost six feet high and would have occupied the most prominent and sacred place in a church: its main, or high, altar. Its sheer size demonstrates Pacino's diversity as an artist, since he is best known as a miniaturist, a painter of illuminated manuscripts.
By the early 1300s, altarpieces had become increasingly large with the goal of visually filling a Gothic church's tall proportions, which in turn evoked the heights of heaven.
Architecture of a Painting
Constructing Design
How does the shape of this altarpiece echo fourteenth-century Florentine architecture? Consider Florence Cathedral's Campanile (bell tower). Compare the style of its windows to the frame of this painting, which was commissioned for the nearby Church of San Firenze.
Architecture of a Painting
Like Statues
Similar to sculptures on a church facade, the holy figures in this altarpiece occupy separate niches and face the viewer.
Worldly Saints
Name Saints
The Church of San Firenze (or Saint Florentius), for which this altarpiece was made, functioned in Florence as a destination for pilgrims. An inscription along the bottom of the painting's central panel states that the altarpiece was commissioned by Simon, priest of San Firenze, from Pacino di Bonaguida, and provides a perhaps incomplete date of when it was painted. Other inscriptions on the frame identify the holy figures on either side of the Crucifixion.
Worldly Saints
Two Romans
Pacino depicted the saints as they may have dressed in their lifetimes (whether in bishops' vestments or ancient Roman togas) but also embellished their garb with inventive patterning, perhaps copied from ornate silk textiles fashionable in Florence at that time.
Saint Bartholemew and Saint Luke—both alive in the first century—wear robes resembling Roman togas. Pacino added elaborate patterning to the trim, perhaps inspired by ornate silk fabrics then fashionable in Florence.
Worldly Saints
Two Bishops
Saint Nicholas and Saint Florentius—both bishops—wear mitres on their heads, high-collared robes with an embroidered panel above the feet, and capelike chasubles that are richly embellished with geometric patterning.
Fabric of a City
Geometric Ornamentation
Pacino painted the figures' garments with intricate patterns that resemble surviving textiles imported from the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire, or those woven in Florence's own thriving silk industry. Such designs didn't just appear on fabric but on various media—such as carved stone, metalwork, and ceramics—manufactured or traded in cities around the Mediterranean.
Fabric of a City
Florence and Fabric
The patterned fabrics worn by the saints in this altarpiece resemble a variety of locally produced and internationally imported designs, which were popular in Florence at the time. By the early 1300s, Florence was one of the main Italian cities for silk and wool manufacturing.
Fabric of a City
Folds of Fabric
Pacino and Giotto were some of the earliest artists to present the fall of fabric in a naturalistic way, suggesting that they observed rather than simply imagined what they painted. In this altarpiece, Pacino skillfully depicts draped cloth over the form of the body, an approach that would become one of the hallmarks of Renaissance art.
Saint Luke
Standing Saint
Drapery Study
Sacred Space
Pride of Place
