High Altar

The Dalle Masegne brothers were already active in Bologna in 1383, and between 1388 and 1392 were at work upon their masterpiece, the high altar of San Francesco. This work is planned like a colossal ivory polyptych, in which saints in full- and half-length set in tabernacles are divided from each other by rows of smaller saints in smaller tabernacles; in the centre is the Coronation of the Virgin with a figure of God the Father above. Beneath, nine narrative reliefs fulfil the function of the painted predella of an altarpiece. The figures are couched in an ambivalent style, in part Tuscan, in part redolent of Northern Italy.