Pietà

Perugino painted this for the church of San Giusto alle Mura, which stood just outside the walls of Florence, and its stillness is the whole point, the dead Christ laid across his mother's knees under a clear architecture of arches, grief held very quiet. The building it was made for did not survive. In 1529, with the army of Emperor Charles V closing in to besiege the city, the Florentines themselves tore down the churches outside the walls so the enemy could find no shelter there, and San Giusto came down with them. The altarpieces were rescued and scattered before the demolition. This one, measured and sweet in the manner Perugino would soon pass to his young pupil Raphael, ended up in the Uffizi, where it hangs now.