The story
Raphael painted several pictures for Città di Castello, a small town in the upper Tiber valley, and only one of them never left. It is a processional banner, painted on both sides around 1500 while he was still in his teens, for the local confraternity of the Holy Trinity. One face shows the Trinity with Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, the two saints people prayed to against plague. The other shows God creating Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam. It was made to be carried through the streets, and today it hangs in the town's picture gallery.
The gallery fills Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera, a Renaissance palace built for Alessandro Vitelli, a mercenary captain, and named after the cannon foundry that once stood nearby. On the garden side the façade is covered in scratched plaster decoration by Cristofano Gherardi, worked from designs by Giorgio Vasari, and inside, frescoed rooms by Gherardi and Cola dell'Amatrice frame a collection gathered largely from churches and convents closed in the 19th century.
A few rooms on, Luca Signorelli's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian of 1498, a painting the young Raphael studied, hangs near a Coronation of the Virgin by the Florentine master Domenico Ghirlandaio. The palace itself came to the town in 1912, a gift from the antiquarian Elia Volpi, who had restored it.
