A Ascensão de Cristo

This tall panel of Christ rising into a golden sky was once the center of a huge altarpiece Perugino built for the Benedictine abbey of San Pietro in Perugia, under a contract he signed in 1495. It stayed there for three centuries. Then in 1797, as Napoleon's armies were stripping Italy of its art, an agent named Jacques-Pierre Tinet picked out the best panels and shipped them to France. The altarpiece was broken up and parceled among French museums, which is why its heart now hangs in Lyon while other fragments are scattered elsewhere. Perugino arranged the apostles and angels in the calm, evenly spaced symmetry his pupil Raphael would soon carry to Rome.