This large triptych depicting a Sacred Conversation, a fairly widespread iconographical format in the Renaissance, shows the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child in the centre of a group of angels and saints. The schematic arrangement and static poses of the figures impart a certain solemnity to the composition. The marble throne on which the Virgin is seated is in the Renaissance style and its polygonal base bears in the centre, amid carved plant racemes, the inscription “AVE GRATIA”, a free interpretation of the words uttered by the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation (Lk, 1:28). Jesus, in his mother’s arms, has an earnest look as he imparts a blessing with his right hand while holding in his left a goldfinch, a traditional reference to his future Passion: a Christian legend claimed that the red part of the bird’s plumage was a result of its attempt to use its beak to remove the crown of thorns at the Crucifixion, indelibly marking itself with the holy blood in the process. The fruit at Mary’s feet also alludes to the fate of Christ and of mankind because the pomegranate is a symbol of the Resurrection. Two angels, one on either side of the throne, hold vases of flowers which also contain a wealth of allusions to the Virgin Mary’s virtues. The saints in the side panels can easily be identified by their canonical attributes. From left to right, we have: St. Dominic holding a lily; St. Andrew the Apostle holding the cross of his martyrdom; St. John the Evangelist with the eagle of the Tetramorph at his feet and in his hand a scroll with the first words of his Gospel in Latin; and St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican theologian, depicted with a sunburst on his chest as he shows the observer the opening page of his Summa Contra Gentiles, a quote from the Book of Proverbs (Prov., 8:7). Behind the figures we can make out an airy landscape with gently rolling, tree-lined hills.
The altarpiece was commissioned from Biagio d’Antonio by the Dominican order for the high altar of the church of Sant’Andrea in Vineis in Faenza in June 1483. The church was renovated in 1595, when the altarpiece, which probably no longer reflected the taste of the day, was moved to a suburban church dedicated to St. Andrew and St. John the Baptist in Pergola, outside Faenza.
The choice of the triptych format was clearly a little dated by the late 15th century and was almost certainly an explicit request from the artist’s stern Dominican patrons. Yet Biagio, a mature Renaissance painter, still managed to impart spatial unity to the three panels by using the same blue sky for his background. In stylistic terms the solemn, sober figures appear to be close to those that populate the crowded scenes frescoed by Domenico Ghirlandaio, with whom Biagio worked on the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel from 1481 to 1482. Such naturalistic details as the vases of flowers held by the angels or the flowery meadow in the foreground reveal the painter’s interest in Flemish art, because we should not forget that in those same years in Florence he could have admired several pictures by northern European artists, for example Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Triptych which reached the city precisely in 1483. The frame we see today was made in the 19th century.
All notion of who had painted the Pergola altarpiece was lost in Faenza over the centuries. It was first mentioned in a study dated 1881 in which Federico Argnani, the Pinacoteca’s first director, attributed it to a local 15th century painter called Giovanni Battista Utili. This mistaken attribution was accepted by critics for several decades, albeit with a few exceptions: De Francovich, writing in 1925–6, for instance, argued that it was a work by Benedetto Ghirlandaio painted in 1492–3. After meticulously studying archive documents in Faenza, however, Carlo Grigioni, writing in 1935, was the first to put forward the name of Biagio d’Antonio, and his hypothesis was confirmed by the scholarship of Ennio Golfieri who published the original document commissioning the work in 1947.
