The Enthroned Virgin and Child with Six Saints from Santo Stefano Castle, Apulia, Italy

Abstract

seven-panel work entitled The Monopoli Altarpiece is displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. It is considered to be a Cretan-Venetian creation from the early fifteenth century. This article  discusses the accounts of what has been written on this topic, and endeavors to bring field-changing vidence about its stylistic and iconographic aspects, the date, the artists who created it, the place it originally came from, and the person who had the idea of mounting an altarpiece. To do so, a comparative study on Byzantine and early-Renaissance painting is carried out, along with more attention paid to the history of Santo Stefano castle. As a result, it appears that the artist of the central panel comes from the Mystras painting school between 1360 and 1380, the author of the other six panels is Lorenzo Veneziano around 1360, and the altarpiece was not a single commission, but the mounting of panels coming from separate artworks. The officer Frà Domenico d’Alemagna, commander of Santo Stefano castle, had the idea of mounting different paintings into a seven-panel altarpiece between 1390 and 1410. The aim is to shed more light on a piece of art which stands as a witness from the twilight of the Middle Ages and the dawn of Renaissance; as a messenger from the Catholic and Orthodox pictorial traditions and collaboration; finally as a fosterer of the triple Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance expression.