Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian

Perugino painted this altarpiece in 1493 for a convent chapel at Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, and he slipped something personal into it. That same year he married Chiara Fancelli, the young daughter of an architect, and the calm face of the Virgin on her high throne is a portrait of his new wife. Below her, John the Baptist points toward the Christ Child while Saint Sebastian stands pierced with arrows, his gaze lifted to heaven. The balanced, pyramid-shaped grouping was still a fairly new idea in Florence, borrowed from Venetian painters like Giovanni Bellini. In his busy Umbrian workshop around these same years, Perugino was training a young apprentice from Urbino named Raphael.