#religious

According to Wikipedia the side panels are on hinges — the whole thing folds shut over the middle like a cupboard, so there's an open view and a closed one. It was made to stand over a church altar, right where the congregation would face it.

This scene was standard issue in Florence then — workshops turned them out constantly for churches and chapels that wanted one. It came out of his apprentice years in someone else's studio, which is apparently why people still argue about how much of it is his hand at all.

The story behind this, apparently, is that the count once gave generously to this particular church, and in return was promised he'd be buried by saints in person. Whether or not you believe that part, this ended up in a church in a very large altarpiece.

Story goes this was a two-person job - an older workshop master and one of his apprentices - and the apprentice's angel on the left came out so much better that the older one supposedly quit painting for good after that.

This was made for a church altar rather than a gallery. According to what I found, Pope Julius II was the one who commissioned it — about as prestigious a job as a painter could land back then.

This is chalk on paper — the kind of sheet that was a step towards something else rather than the thing itself. He's said to have burned a lot of his own drawings late in life, supposedly so nobody would ever see the working-out behind the finished stuff. Ones like this got out anyway, and now they're framed and lit the same way the paintings are.

For a long time this hung under 'unknown Sevillian painter' — only fairly recently did anyone decide it's an early Velázquez, from before he'd really found his style. The purple cloth is apparently a deliberate touch too, a color tied to preparation, since John's whole story is about getting the way ready for someone else.

Statues like this apparently went up in Catholic villages all over the Low Countries between the wars — whole parishes would chip in to get their own. This one puts locals in the scene too: a farmer with his spade on one side, a mother with her child on the other.

This started life, from what's recorded, as a tabletop rather than a wall hanging — you were meant to look down into it like a dinner plate. Whether it's actually by Bosch himself or a workshop follower has been argued over for more than a century.

Apparently not everyone who studies Leonardo's other work is convinced this one is fully his — some think it's more workshop than master.

It was made for the dining hall of a monastery in Venice — a whole wall of feasting to eat your own supper under. French troops carried it off in 1797 and, it's said, cut it in half to get it out of the building.

The whole chapel this sits in was paid for by a banker's son — supposedly to make up for the money his father made lending at interest, which the Church counted as a sin at the time. It's one panel out of a whole wall of them telling the story in order, so it was never meant to be looked at on its own.

It was painted for a side chapel and, according to Wikipedia, it was his first proper public commission — the job that made his name overnight. He put everyone in the clothes of his own day instead of anything biblical, which supposedly didn't go down well with all of the people paying for it.

I couldn't find much on this one beyond the title — it's a drawing, and the saint part looks almost like an excuse to draw the view behind him.

The story goes that he kept this one — it was still in his studio when he died, and his sons sold it off to clear what he owed. No one's settled on when he painted it either; the guesses spread across a couple of decades.

This was originally made to open one of his illustrated prophecy books, not meant to hang on its own. From what I can find, he loved this particular design enough to keep redrawing it for the rest of his life - one copy was finished only weeks before he died.

Apparently this is one of his earliest known paintings — from back when he was still learning from a couple of older Venetian painters.

The gold leaf here is heavier than usual for Bosch, from what I can tell — most of his other work skips it.

I couldn't track down who commissioned this one, but paintings like this were usually meant for a private chapel or a bedroom, not a church altar where everyone could see it.

It's the doubting Thomas story — the apostle who said he wouldn't believe the resurrection until he'd put his hand in the wound himself. A rich Roman collector paid for it, apparently, and it later bounced through a royal collection and somehow came through the Second World War without a scratch.