Boatmen Altarpiece

Giovanni Agostino da Lodi's Boatmen Altarpiece, painted around 1492 and now in the church of San Pietro Martire in Monza, is a major late fifteenth-century altarpiece commissioned by the guild of Milanese boatmen — one of the numerous specialized craft guilds that were important patrons of religious art throughout Italy. Guild altarpieces reflected the social identity and devotional life of these occupational communities, which typically dedicated themselves to a patron saint and maintained an altar in a local church as the focus of their collective worship and charity.

Oil on panel with the Lombard Leonardesque technique — soft sfumato modelling of faces, pyramidal compositional arrangement, gentle graduated tonality replacing the sharp outlines of earlier Lombard painting.