The Purification

This altarpiece was commissioned by the Congregation of the Merchants of Piacenza for St. Vincent’s church and it represents, with refined softness, the double episode related by Luke the Evangelist: according to the Jewish laws, forty days after childbirth, the Virgin Mary goes to the Temple of Jerusalem to purify herself and to redeem Jesus through the sacrifice of a lamb (for the Jews a new-born child belongs to God and not to its parents).