Galitzin-Triptychon

This Crucifixion has travelled further than most paintings survive to tell. Perugino painted it in the early 1480s for a Dominican church in San Gimignano, in Tuscany. When French troops suppressed the monastery in the 1790s it was carried off and sold, this time as a work of the young Raphael, to Prince Galitzin, the Russian ambassador in Rome. It went to Moscow, then into the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. In 1931 Stalin's government quietly sold it to the American financier Andrew Mellon, whose collection became the founding core of the National Gallery in Washington. The Raphael attribution finally collapsed on a date, since the man who first owned it had died when Raphael was only 14.