Pinacoteca Room VI

The many compartments of Alunno’s altarpiece give each figure a place within an elaborate frame. At the centre are Mary’s crowning and the dead Christ, surrounded by saints. The work carries the date 1466 and came from Montelparo in the Marche region. Alunno was the name used by the painter Niccolò di Liberatore. A painting divided into several panels is called a polyptych. Here, the frame is part of how you read the work. It separates people while bringing them into one larger sacred assembly. Carlo Crivelli’s Pietà concentrates on mourning for Christ. It probably belonged to the upper part of another multi-panel altarpiece. Look at its drawn contours and the relationship between the bodies before considering its former position. The room lets you compare two surviving works whose shapes were once connected to a larger structure and to the way worshippers saw an altar.