Assomption de la Vierge

By 1506 Perugino was a famous but fading name. The gentle, symmetrical style that had made him one of Italy's most sought-after painters was starting to look old-fashioned beside his former pupil Raphael and the younger Florentines. That year Cardinal Oliviero Carafa brought him to Naples to paint this altarpiece for the cathedral, an Assumption with the Virgin carried up in a ring of angels and the apostles left gathered around her empty tomb below. Vasari singled it out when he wrote Perugino's life a few decades later. It is a design Perugino trusted and kept close to, painting much the same composition again years afterward for a church in Corciano, near his home in Umbria.