The Liberation of St. Peter

This unfinished relief, together with the one showing the “Crucifixion of St. Peter”, was to form part of the predella of a marble altar for that saint’s chapel in the Cathedral, commissioned from Luca, together with an altar for St. Paul, in 1439; but neither work was ever finished. These reliefs are fundamental for understanding how Luca interpreted Donatello’s dynamism of scenes in space (see “The Feast of Herod”) and Masaccio’s synthetic force of real representation (see the predella, now in Berlin, of the Pisa Polyptych). Luca brings his scenes back from the complex, existential truth of actual place and time to the serene clarity of an ideal space: he extracts from the natural spectacle the simple, proportioned elements essential to the plainest and most harmonious composition, limpid forms measured in the light on a ground plane cut out in decided differences of depth, emphasised by all the details of the setting.