Apparition of the Virgin to St. Bernard is a painting by the Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 painter Filippino Lippi

Filippino Lippi

Filippino Lippi was an Italian painter working during the High Renaissance in Florence, Italy.-Biography:...

, dated 1480. It is housed in the Badia Fiorentina

Badia Fiorentina

The Badìa Fiorentina is an abbey and church now home to the Fraternity of Jerusalem situated on the Via del Proconsolo in the centre of Florence, Italy. Dante supposedly grew up across the street in what is now called the 'Casa di Dante', rebuilt in 1910 as a museum to Dante...

, a church in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

.

The picture was commissioned for the chapel of Francesco del Pugliese by the latter's son Piero, who is portrayed in the lower right corner in the traditional praying posture of the donor.

It is one of the most admired Lippi's works, due to its powerful, Flemish-inspired chromatism and attention to details, which contribute in turning the mystical apparition of the Virgin to St. Bernard

Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard of Clairvaux, O.Cist was a French abbot and the primary builder of the reforming Cistercian order.After the death of his mother, Bernard sought admission into the Cistercian order. Three years later, he was sent to found a new abbey at an isolated clearing in a glen known as the Val...

 into an everyday life scene. The composition is set in a rocky landscape in which the saint, while writing on his lectern

Lectern

A lectern is a reading desk with a slanted top, usually placed on a stand or affixed to some other form of support, on which documents or books are placed as support for reading aloud, as in a scripture reading, lecture, or sermon...

, is suddenly visited by the Virgin. Behind Bernard's shoulders is depicted the demon biting his chains: this is a reference to a medieval hymn celebrating the Virgin as the liberator of humanity from the chains of their sins.

A scroll on a rock contains a verse by the 3rd century AD stoic

STOIC

STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...

 writer Epictetus

Epictetus

Epictetus was a Greek sage and Stoic philosopher. He was born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia , and lived in Rome until banishment when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece where he lived the rest of his life. His teachings were noted down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses...

: Sustine et abstine ("Carry on and abstain"), a hint to Bernard's teachings.

Some scholars have identified in the faces of the Virgin and the angels on the left the portraits of the committent's wife and sons