Museo Civico di Viterbo

Around 1516 Giovanni Botonti, a cleric of Viterbo, ordered an altarpiece for the church of San Francesco and ended up with two artists in one picture. Michelangelo supplied the design and his Venetian friend Sebastiano del Piombo painted it. This Pietà is the earliest known result of their partnership in Rome, which joined Michelangelo's drawing to Venetian colour at a moment when Raphael dominated the city. Christ's body lies stretched on the ground while the Virgin sits upright above him with her hands joined, set against a dark landscape. A sheet of studies in the Albertina in Vienna, mostly attributed to Michelangelo, works out that pose of the joined hands.

The painting now hangs in the Museo Civico, which opened in 1955 in the former convent beside the church of Santa Maria della Verità and has been dedicated since 2011 to Luigi Rossi Danielli, a local architect who gave the city his archaeological finds. Sebastiano's later Flagellation, from 1524, hangs in the same gallery, along with panels by the Roman painter Antoniazzo Romano and the Sienese Sano di Pietro.

The museum's other half is Etruscan. It keeps sarcophagi of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC from the ancient sites around the city, Norchia and Musarna among them.