Grand Council Altarpiece

Fra Bartolomeo painted this Grand Council Altarpiece around 1510 for the Museum of San Marco in Florence. The large-scale altarpiece was one of the most ambitious commissions of his career, intended for the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, though it was never completed due to the political upheavals in Florence. The oil medium allowed for rich tonal transitions and glazed layers of color that created luminous depth impossible with the older tempera technique. Such devotional panels served both liturgical contexts in churches and chapels and private devotional use in the homes of wealthy families who maintained personal altars and oratories.

The unfinished altarpiece reveals Fra Bartolomeo's working method with the monumental composition blocked out in broad tonal areas, demonstrating his approach to building up the painting from the general to the particular through atmospheric chiaroscuro.