Gottvater mit Cherubim und Engeln

This half-moon panel of God the Father, spreading his hands over a crowd of small angels, was never meant to hang on its own. It is the crowning lunette of a huge altarpiece Perugino painted in the late 1490s for the Benedictine abbey of San Pietro in Perugia, unveiled there in 1500. God leans down and blesses, because directly below him, in the main panel, Christ was rising into the sky. The whole thing read from bottom to top. Then history broke it apart. In 1797 an agent working for Napoleon picked out the best panels and shipped them to France, and this piece, with the Ascension below it, ended up in the museum at Lyon, while other fragments stayed in Italy.