Collection: St. Thomas Aquinas

ARTIST: Museum Religious Art Classics

ARTWORK NARRATIVE:

Artist: Carlo Crivelli – c. 1476

Crivelli painted two altarpieces for the small church of San Domenico, in the town of Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marche. A large, multi-paneled altarpiece sat on the high altar, while a smaller altarpiece was in a side chapel. In the nineteenth century parts of both altarpieces were sold to a Russian prince, Anatole Demidoff, who mounted them in a grand frame to make a three-tiered altarpiece for the chapel of his villa in Florence. The National Gallery bought the Altarpiece in 1868, and in 1961 the panels from the smaller polyptych were removed. They are now displayed separately.

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, Catholic priest, and Doctor of the Church. An immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism, he is also known within the latter as the Doctor Angelicus and the Doctor Communis.

His feast day is January 28.