The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497) · c. 1450-1475
The panel is arranged in three tiers. At the top Christ blesses from a glory of light, flanked by Saint Paul, Moses and the four Evangelists. In the middle Saint Thomas Aquinas sits enthroned with his books, between the pagan philosophers Aristotle and Plato, whose thought he reconciled with Christian faith, while beneath his feet lies the defeated Averroes, the Muslim commentator on Aristotle whose ideas the Church condemned. At the bottom an assembly of churchmen and laymen is presided over by a pope. Inscriptions in capitals name several of the figures and explain their relation to the saint.
Benozzo Gozzoli, best known for his frescoes of the Magi in the Medici palace, painted the panel in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Vasari saw it in Pisa cathedral in fifteen sixty eight, and it stood there behind the archbishop's seat until November eighteen twelve. In eighteen thirteen it was removed and sent to the Louvre under the Napoleonic seizures, and unlike most of those works it was never returned. The arched top and the repainted edges are later alterations, probably of the sixteenth century.
Did You Know? The panel stood in Pisa cathedral behind the archbishop's seat for more than three centuries before Napoleon's agents carried it off to Paris in eighteen thirteen.
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