Gonfalon with the Pietà

This was never meant to hang on a wall. It is a gonfalon, a banner painted on cloth to be carried through the streets in procession, made around 1472 for the Franciscan house at Farneto, just outside Perugia, and brought out for the processions of Lent. Perugino was young here, years before he would run a large workshop and teach a boy named Raphael. He painted the Virgin holding the dead Christ across her lap, a grief-image that carvers north of the Alps had long shaped in wood. Being cloth, it was carried, folded, and left exposed to weather and candle smoke for generations, which is why so few banners like it survive.