Madonna of the Girdle

In April 1848, a year of revolutions across Europe, Pope Pius IX raised the Umbrian hill town of Montefalco to the rank of city. Montefalco thanked him with a gift, this altarpiece, which Benozzo Gozzoli had painted around 1450 for the high altar of San Fortunato, a friary church just outside the town. It has stayed in the popes' collection ever since.

The subject comes from a legend about the end of the Virgin's life. The apostle Thomas missed her death and burial, and he would not believe the others when they told him she had been taken up into heaven. So, as she rises among angels, Mary lets her girdle down into his hands as proof. Along the predella underneath, six small scenes tell her story, from her birth and marriage through the Annunciation, the Nativity and the Circumcision to her death.

In 2015, after four months of restoration in the Vatican's own workshops, the panel went back to Montefalco for the first time in 167 years. Until the spring of 2016 it stood in the town's museum of San Francesco, raised on a base so that visitors saw it at the height of the altar it was made for.