Deposition from the Cross

On 25 January 1504 a panel of Florentine artists met to decide where Michelangelo's David should stand. Filippino Lippi and Pietro Perugino both sat on it, and this altarpiece is where their paths crossed. The friars of Santissima Annunziata had commissioned it from Lippi for their high altar, as the front of a double-sided structure whose back, an Assumption, is still in the church. Filippino began at the top, with the figure of Christ, and broke off almost at once. He died that spring. Infrared images made during the 1997 restoration showed that he had already started the face of Mary Magdalene, imagining her with her arms around the cross. According to Vasari, Perugino took the work over in 1507 and finished it the same year, which is why the museum names both painters. In the finished picture the Magdalene kneels at the foot of the cross.