The Assumption of the Virgin

In the 1730s Clemens August of Bavaria was one of the great churchmen-princes of the Holy Roman Empire, Elector and Archbishop of Cologne and Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, the old crusading order of knights. Around 1735 he ordered this altarpiece from Venice for the order's church at Sachsenhausen, across the river from Frankfurt. It was set over the high altar in 1736 and cost him 2000 florins.

The canvas is more than five metres tall, and Piazzetta, a painter known for deep shadow, filled most of it with pale light. The Virgin rises in white through a sky crowded with angels, and far below the apostles press around her open tomb. One of them, in white, throws both arms up towards her, while others lean over the stone edge to look at the empty shroud.

The painting did not stay in Germany. French commissioners removed it in 1796, during the Revolutionary wars, and in 1801 it was sent to the museum in Lille. In the First World War, with Lille under German occupation, it was taken to Berlin, and it came back in 1919. It reached the Louvre from Lille in 1957, in an exchange of deposits between the two museums.