Der heilige Hieronymus und die heilige Maria Magdalena

This panel never faced the congregation. It came from a double-sided altarpiece in the Augustinian church in Perugia, from the side that looked into the friars' choir, so the people who lived with it were the community itself. It pairs Saint Jerome, the hermit scholar who put the Bible into Latin, with Mary Magdalene.

Perugino took the commission in 1502 and was still working on it in 1513, when the choir side was begun. He was in his mid-sixties by then. His soft, symmetrical manner had gone out of fashion in Florence, and his work was going almost entirely to Umbrian churches. He died in 1523 with the altarpiece still unfinished.

The Napoleonic suppressions broke the whole structure up. Its panels are now divided between Perugia, Paris, Lyon, Grenoble, Toulouse and Birmingham. This one is 174 centimetres tall and stayed in the city, a few streets from the church it was painted for.