The story
Walk into Perugia's main square and the cathedral of San Lorenzo turns its side to you. Its long flank, with marble facing that was never completed, looks across at the Fontana Maggiore, the city's medieval fountain, while the main door opens onto a smaller square behind. Building began in 1345 and was finished in 1490.
It is primarily a working cathedral, but art lovers come for one painting. In the Chapel of San Bernardino hangs the Deposition from the Cross by Federico Barocci, the painter from Urbino, made between 1567 and 1569. Barocci prepared it with an unusual quantity of drawings, 36 known studies, three of them full-size cartoons used to transfer the design.
The first chapel keeps a relic venerated here as the wedding ring of the Virgin Mary, which came to Perugia from the Tuscan town of Chiusi in 1473, over Chiusi's protests, and sits in a reliquary made by Renaissance goldsmiths. In the cathedral museum next door hangs an altarpiece by Luca Signorelli, the painter from Cortona, near illuminated manuscripts, some from the 10th century.
