Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Perugino painted this in Florence in 1495, for the nuns of the convent of Santa Chiara. At that moment he was arguably the most admired painter in Italy, and a boy named Raphael would soon be learning in his workshop. You can see what Raphael took from him here: the stillness. Where other artists made the deposition of Christ a storm of weeping, Perugino spreads the mourners out in a calm, balanced row against a wide gentle landscape, their grief quiet and contained. Joseph of Arimathea, on the right, wears a curious hat trimmed with flowers. Fellow painters admired the picture so much that Fra Bartolomeo and Andrea del Sarto both echoed it in works that now hang in the same Florentine gallery.