Orsini Polyptych

The Orsini Polyptych (also known as the Orsini Altarpiece or Passion Polyptych) is an altarpiece produced at an unknown location by Simone Martini for private devotion by a cardinal of the Orsini family. Its precise date is still under discussion. It was taken to France very early in its lifespan and formed a major influence on late medieval French artists. It is now split between the Louvre in Paris, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. On the back of the Louvre panel (Christ Bearing the Cross) is the coat of arms of the Orsini family. It shows the man who commissioned the painting dressed as a cardinal at the foot of the Cross. Some art historians see this as a portrait of the Roman cardinal Napoleone Orsini, who owned a fragment of the True Cross, which may explain the choice of subject. Under this hypothesis, he commissioned it before leaving Rome for the papal court in Avignon or in Avignon itself, where Martini followed Orsini. The altarpiece was probably in the Champmol Charterhouse, near Dijon, by the end of the 14th century. It was still there in the prior's chambers in 1791, when it was sold and split up. The four panels in Antwerp (the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin of the Annunciation) were sold in Dijon in 1826 and acquired for the collection of Florent van Ertborn, mayor of Antwerp; they were originally two panels, with Gabriel and the Virgin on the reverse of the other two panels, before they were later sawn off. Van Ertborn bequeathed these panels to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in 1841. The Louvre panel (Christ Bearing the Cross) was bought from a man named L. Saint-Denis in 1834. The Berlin panel (the Entombment) was bought from the Paris art dealer Émile Pacully in 1904. Originally it had the same golden background as the other panels, but this was painted over in red, probably in the middle of the 15th century.