The Annunciation with Saint Francis and Saint Louis of Toulouse [four panels]

The four surviving panels of Cosimo Tura's Annunciation with Saints Francis and Louis of Toulouse represent the most complete surviving portion of the dismembered Roverella Altarpiece, the masterpiece of Ferrarese Quattrocento painting and the most ambitious altarpiece commission in the Este duchy. Bishop Bartolomeo Roverella commissioned the polyptych for the high altar of San Giorgio fuori le mura, Ferrara, and the work was probably completed over the decade of the 1470s. The dispersal of the altarpiece — its main panel long lost, its predella and lateral panels distributed between London, Paris, Rome, and New York — has made reconstruction of the original programme a scholarly project that has occupied Ferrarese art historians for over a century. Viewing the four panels together gives a rare sense of Tura's architectural and chromatic ambitions for the work as a whole.

The four-panel grouping reveals Tura's use of continuous architectural elements to unify what are physically separate panels: the pilasters, niches, and decorative moldings of the frame design were conceived as a single spatial system extending across all four panels. The chromatic programme is similarly coherent: cool marble architectural tones throughout, with the deep crimson and blue of the central Annunciation figures providing the warmest colour notes in the ensemble.