Políptico Albani Torlonia

This folding altarpiece was painted in 1491 by Perugino, the Umbrian master who would soon run one of the busiest workshops in Italy and who trained the young Raphael. The man who ordered it was Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, a hard, ambitious churchman who a dozen years later became Pope Julius the Second, the pope who set Michelangelo to the Sistine ceiling and Raphael to the papal rooms. At this earlier moment he wanted a private devotional piece. Perugino gave him a Nativity at the centre, flanked by standing saints against one continuous landscape, with a small Crucifixion and Annunciation set above. It has stayed in Roman hands ever since and now belongs to the Torlonia collection there, still worked in egg tempera on wood in the old manner, just as the fashion was turning to oil.