Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon

This altarpiece was painted around 1455 in the south of France, near Avignon, where the popes had held court a century before and Italian and Spanish influences still crossed. For a long time no one knew who made it. When the writer Prosper Mérimée came across it in a church at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon in 1834, he guessed it was by the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini. Others placed it anywhere between Portugal and Sicily. Only in 1959 did the scholar Charles Sterling propose the local artist Enguerrand Quarton, the name now generally accepted. Look past the grieving figures around the dead Christ and there is a flat gold sky, and on the horizon a tiny walled city meant for Jerusalem, painted by someone who had almost certainly never left Provence.