The Descent into Limbo

This panel is by the Master of the Osservanza, named after a large altarpiece in the church of the Osservanza outside of Siena. It belongs to the predella, or lower register, of a similar altarpiece that presents episodes from the Passion of Christ. Although the altarpiece from which it comes was dismantled and is now difficult to reconstruct accurately, all five scenes from its predella survive. They form one of the artist’s most important narrative cycles and are among the most remarkable Sienese paintings of the fifteenth century. Predellas devoted to the Passion were not uncommon, but the depiction of the Descent into Limbo is unusual and may relate to a Sienese literary source. In La resurrezione (The Resurrection), a fourteenth-century poem by Niccolò Cicerchia, Christ storms through hell, helping the three patriarchs — Adam, Abel, and Noah — to escape. Here they may be the older men being drawn to the luminous glow of the resurrected Christ.