Bentivoglio Altarpiece Bentivoglio Altarpiece The Bentivoglio Altarpiece is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Costa the Elder, dating to August 1488. It is displayed in the Bentivoglio Chapel of the church of San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna, Italy. It was commissioned by Giovanni II Bentivoglio, lord of Bologna, as a thanksgiving for the family’s escape from an attempted massacre by the Malvezzi family . The painting is a large canvas, executed by Costa together with other two works on the chapel's walls, the "Triumph of Fame" and the "Triumph of Death". It features, above a sumptuous Renaissance architecture, a marble altar
Altarpiece Reformation regarded the Word of God – that is, the gospel – as central to Christendom, and Protestant altarpieces often displayed the actual words from the bible, sometimes at the expense of pictures. With time, Protestant though gave birth to the so-called pulpit altar, or "Kanzelaltar" in German, in which the altarpiece and the pulpit are combined, thus making the altarpiece quite literally the abode of the Word of God. Canvas painting started to replace other types of altarpieces during the mid-16th century and onwards. The Middle Ages was the heyday of the production and use of altarpieces. While many