Madonna de Loreto

Around 1500 Perugino was arguably the most sought-after painter in Italy, the master who had trained the young Raphael. Within a few years that reputation collapsed. In Florence a new generation, Leonardo and Michelangelo among them, made his gentle, symmetrical manner look old-fashioned, and one biographer reported that the public had tired of it. So Perugino went home to Umbria and kept doing what he did best. This altarpiece was commissioned for a chapel in a Perugia church by a local man, Giovanni di Matteo Schiavone, who died in June 1507, a few months before it was delivered that September. The Virgin sits between Saints Jerome and Francis, two angels holding a crown above her head, painted with the same serene balance he had trusted for decades.