Pala Baglioni

In the summer of 1500, a young man named Grifonetto Baglioni joined a plot that slaughtered much of his own family as they slept in Perugia. He was killed soon after in revenge, and his mother, Atalanta, who had refused to shelter him, was left to grieve. A few years later she commissioned this altarpiece from the young Raphael. It shows Christ being carried to the tomb, and the straining youth who bears his shoulders is often read as Grifonetto himself, the dead son carried by loving hands. Raphael signed and dated it 1507. A century later, in 1608, agents of a Borghese cardinal quietly removed it from its Perugia chapel by night, which is how it reached Rome.