The story
The painting most visitors come to Volterra's picture gallery to see shows men on ladders lowering a dead body. Rosso Fiorentino, a young painter from Florence, signed and dated this Deposition from the Cross in 1521 for a confraternity called the Compagnia della Croce di Giorno, whose chapel stood beside the church of San Francesco. It stayed there until 1788. Its angular figures and cold, bright colours have made it one of the best-known early works of Mannerism, the restless style that followed the High Renaissance, and the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio later wrote it into one of his novels.
The gallery itself opened in 1905 on the upper floor of the Palazzo dei Priori, Volterra's medieval town hall. Since 1982 it has occupied Palazzo Minucci Solaini, a Renaissance palace in the old centre.
Rosso shares the rooms with earlier Tuscan masters. Luca Signorelli, the painter from Cortona, is here with an Annunciation of 1491, and Domenico Ghirlandaio, the Florentine fresco painter, with a Christ in Glory with four saints and a donor, dated 1492.
