The story
Low in Perugino's fresco, beneath God the Father and two saints, sits a tiny portrait of Deruta itself, with its walls, its houses and the Gothic bell tower of San Francesco ending in a spire that was altered in 1704. Restorers found that the young painter spent three full days on that view alone. The town ordered the picture in the late 1470s, after plague struck the countryside around Perugia, and chose two protectors. One is Saint Rocco, the pilgrim saint of plague victims, who shows the wound on his leg. The other is Saint Romano.
For centuries the fresco stayed in the church of San Francesco. It was detached from the wall and in 1975 moved here, to the Palazzo dei Consoli, the town's 14th-century civic hall. Its neighbours come from the same local churches, among them two works by Niccolò Alunno, a painter from nearby Foligno, the Madonna dei Consoli and a processional banner of Saint Anthony Abbot. On the floor above hangs the collection of Lione Pascoli, the 18th-century biographer of painters, given to the town in 1931, with canvases by the Roman Baroque painter Gaulli and by Sebastiano Conca.
