Pietà with Four Saints

The panel is only about 22 centimetres high. The Borghese inventory of 1693 called it roughly a palm tall. It was a predella, the strip of small pictures along the foot of an altarpiece, and the altarpiece above it is lost. In the centre, John and Mary Magdalene help the Virgin hold the dead Christ. The figures at the sides hint at its first home. Anthony of Padua was a Franciscan friar, and Elizabeth of Hungary, crowned and dressed as a nun, belonged to the order's lay branch, so the ensemble probably came from a Franciscan house. That inventory gave it to Perugino, whose gentle Umbrian manner was much in demand in Florence around 1500. In 1928 the critic Roberto Longhi recognised it as early work by Andrea del Sarto, from around 1508. On the far left, Saint Apollonia holds up the pincers used to pull out her teeth.