Polittico di Sant'Agostino

What hangs in the Louvre is one panel from something enormous. Around 1502 the Augustinian friars of Perugia asked Perugino for a high altarpiece, and what he built over the next twenty years stood more than eight metres tall, painted on both sides, made of some thirty separate panels held in a frame of columns and cornices. It was the biggest commission of his late career, and he was still finishing parts of it near his death in 1523. Three centuries later, when religious houses were suppressed under Napoleon, the whole structure was taken apart and its panels sent in different directions. Most stayed in Perugia. Others reached Toulouse, Lyon, Grenoble and Birmingham. The Paris fragment, a young saint holding a sword, once had nearly thirty neighbours.