Tabernacle: Dormition (detail)
by ORCAGNA, Marble, lapis lazuli, gold and glass inlay
On the back of the tabernacle, built to house Bernardo Daddi’s repainting of a lost image of the Virgin and Child, is the large relief “Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin.” The two scenes, treated as one, are separated by the horizontal band of the tomb.
In the Dormition scene the Apostles who crowd round the Virgin’s tomb give vent to their emotions with violent rhetoric. In the middle stands Christ holding a child symbolic of the Virgin’s soul, flanked by two angels.