Crucifixion Diptych (van der Weyden) The painting's provenance prior to the mid-19th century is unknown. Its extreme starkness has led art historians to theorize that it was created as a devotional work, possibly for a Carthusian monastery. It is not known if the panels comprised a self-contained diptych, two-thirds of a triptych, or originally were a single panel. Some art historians have mentioned that the work seems unbalanced overall and lacking symmetry (which might indicate a missing panel or panels). Recent scholarship proposes that the panels functioned as the outer shutters of a carved altarpiece. The background to the panels is unknown. Scholars have theorized
San Marco Altarpiece of cast shadows towards the bottom edges of the draperies in the painting, which are indicative of how Angelico gave the medieval equation of earthly and heavenly beauty new immediacy by translating it into the rational language of a representational style. In addition, as Angelico implies in other ways, glazing was a technique used to create yet another boundary between the real world and the pictorial illusion. San Marco Altarpiece The San Marco Altarpiece (also known as "Madonna and Saints") is a painting by the Italian early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, housed in the San Marco Museum of Florence, Italy.