San Girolamo risuscita il cardinale Andrea

This is a small panel, about 30 centimetres each way, one of three surviving scenes from a predella, the strip of little pictures that ran along the base of an altarpiece, probably one dedicated to Saint Jerome. The subject is not biblical. It comes from a letter supposedly written by Cyril of Jerusalem to Saint Augustine, a medieval forgery that circulated widely and credited Jerome with miracles after his death, among them raising a bishop called Andrea from the dead. The panel reached Paris through the collapse of one collection. It belonged to the Marquis Campana in Rome, who ran the papal pawnbroking bank and went bankrupt, and the papal government sold his holdings to France in 1861 for the new Musee Napoleon III. It entered the Louvre in 1863 under the name of Pesellino, having been listed the year before as a Pisanello. Only later did it become a Perugino of the third quarter of the 15th century.