Il miracolo della neve

The subject is a Roman legend. On an August night in the year 352, snow was said to have fallen on a hill in Rome and marked out the ground plan of a church, the future Santa Maria Maggiore. Perugino painted this small scene of it early in his career, around 1472, when he was a young man picking up work in Florence. It was never meant to stand alone. It is a predella panel, one of the narrow images that ran along the base of a larger altarpiece now lost, so it survives as a fragment of something bigger. The attribution to Perugino is likely rather than certain. Today the panel is kept at Polesden Lacey, a country house in Surrey, England, cared for by the National Trust.