O Descimento da Cruz

In May 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V stormed and sacked Rome, and the artists who had been thriving there scattered. Rosso Fiorentino fled, first to Perugia and then to the small Tuscan town of Sansepolcro, where a local confraternity gave him this altarpiece to paint. He finished it in 1528. A younger local painter, Raffaellino del Colle, had held the commission first and ceded it, so that the refugee would leave something of his own in the town. Rosso set the deposition against a dark, almost airless ground, the mourners' faces sharp with a strained, off-key grief. Within a few years he had left Italy altogether for the court of the French king at Fontainebleau.