Sansepolcro Cathedral

Left of the high altar in the cathedral of Sansepolcro hangs the Volto Santo, the Holy Face, a large carved wooden figure of Christ on the cross, dressed in a long tunic and looking out with wide-open eyes. How old it is has long been argued. Its style led scholars to the 11th century, but radiocarbon tests presented in 2020 placed the wood in the Carolingian period, the 8th or 9th century.

The church began as an abbey. Local tradition ties the town's beginnings to relics brought back from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which is where the name Sansepolcro comes from. The building went up in the 11th century, later passed to the Camaldolese monks, a branch of the Benedictines, and became a cathedral in 1520, when Pope Leo X made the town the seat of a diocese.

In the left aisle hangs Perugino's Ascension of Christ, painted around 1510 by the Umbrian master who had trained Raphael. It takes up a composition he had already used for the abbey church of San Pietro in Perugia.