Saint Peter Enthroned with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Paul

On 16 August 1516 the abbess of the Franciscan convent of Santa Maria Mater Domini in Conegliano, Sister Antonia, paid the painter part of the 70 ducats his fee came to, and the receipt survives. That payment makes this the last work by Cima that anyone can date from documents. He was working for a house in the town he came from, about 60 kilometres north of Venice, and he died roughly a year later. Peter sits at the centre dressed as a pope, in the three-tiered crown and white vestments, with the keys of heaven at his feet, the Baptist on one side and Paul with his sword on the other. Below the throne an angel sits playing a lute. The loggia opens onto landscape left and right, and the panel spent a long stretch hanging in the convent refectory before the suppressions of 1811 sent it to Milan.