Deposition (Luco Altarpiece)

For two and a half centuries this hung where it was made for, on the altar of the Camaldolese nuns at Luco, in the hills of the Mugello. The abbess, Caterina della Casa, commissioned it in the autumn of 1523 and the painter was paid by October of the following year. Then in 1782 the grand duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo, bought it from the convent and left the nuns a copy by Sante Pacini to put back on the altar. It went to the Uffizi, was swapped in 1795 for the Madonna of the Harpies and came here to the Pitti, and in 1799 it was taken to Paris with the rest of the Napoleonic haul, returning in 1815. Andrea built the composition out of Fra Bartolomeo's Pietà, which came in turn out of a Lamentation by Perugino, and all three panels now hang in this same gallery.