The picture was commissioned by the poet Matteo Palmieri and his wife Niccolosa, presumably for their burial chapel in the now-destroyed church of San Pier Maggiore, Florence. However, some scholars believe it was instead intended for Palmieri's chapel in the Badia Fiesolana (outside Florence) because the dimensions are almost the same as Hans Memling's Last Judgment, a work initially intended for the Badia but later stolen and taken to Gdansk, Poland. Several preparatory drawings for Botticini's altarpiece survive in various collections. The altarpiece's unusual composition and subject was surely dictated by its patrons, who appear in the lower corners of the composition. The background includes a view of Florence and the Arno valley. Some of Palmieri's properties on the hills of Fiesole, such as the farm included in his wife's dowry, are clearly discernible. The interpretation of Mary's bodily assumption into heaven, with the Virgin welcomed by rings of angels and saints, is based on the last stanza of Palmeri's poem, the Città di Vita (1465). The poem describes a controversial Lucretian idea that the soul began in heaven and descended to earth, without being crafted by God. Vasari wrote that Botticini's Assumption, like Palmieri's poem, was considered heretical and thus covered soon after its completion. This claim is likely fictitious but the donors' faces have indeed been scratched out, clearly indicating the controversies that surrounded Palmieri's ideas. In the 1480s Botticini was consistently employed in Florence as well as nearby Empoli. For Empoli's collegiata church of Sant'Andrew he created two large tabernacles, one dedicated to Saint Sebastian and the other the Holy Sacrament. Both tabernacles are today in the adjoining museum. The larger of the two, theTabernacle of the Sacrament, was commissioned in 1486 and was largely complete by 1491, when it was installed on the church's high altar. In 1504, however, Botticini's son Raffaello was called in to add the finishing touches. Several preparatory drawings survive for the draperies of the saints in the side panels. In 1488 Botticini painted an altarpiece of the Pietà with Four Saints for the meeting room of the Confraternity of San Domenico del Giglio at the basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, now at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. Throughout his career, Botticini painted numerous panels with religious subjects for the homes of Florentine citizens. He was especially popular as a painter of tondi, or circular pictures, invariably of the Virgin and the