Altarpiece

   A painted or sculpted panel that either stands on the altar of a church or hangs above it, its primary function being to serve as visual focus during meditation or prayer. Altarpieces created in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries often have multiple panels that can be opened and closed, as well as pinnacles that imitate the Gothic architectural vocabulary and a predella. An example of this is Pietro Lorenzetti's Virgin and Child with Saints, Annunciation, and Assumption painted for the Pieve di Santa Maria in Arezzo (1320). The Northern examples of the same period can be quite complicated, and open in a series of stages to reveal the interior scenes, as in, for example, Matthias Grünewald 's Isenheim Altarpiece (fin. 1515; Colmar, Musée d'Unterlinden). These polyptychs, as they are called, were usually painted in grisaille in the exterior and with brilliant colors in the interior to add a sense of awe when opened during feast days. In Spain, altarpieces are called retables (in Spanish, retablos) and have panels that remain opened and are often contained in heavy sculptural frames. By the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, these complex formats were rejected in favor of representations on a single field. In the North, they continued for a longer period, with Peter Paul Rubens' Elevation of the Cross for the Church of St. Walburga in Antwerp (1610-1611), providing an early 17th-century example.

   See also San Zeno altarpiece, Verona; St. Lucy altarpiece; Triptych.