Алтарь Одди

Raphael was barely twenty when the Oddi family of Perugia hired him, around 1502, to paint the Coronation of the Virgin for their chapel. It is an early work, and it shows how close he still stood to his teacher Perugino, in the sweet faces and the gentle, even light. The picture splits into two worlds. Above, among angel musicians, Christ sets a crown on Mary. Below, the apostles gather around her empty tomb, and in a lovely touch it has filled with flowers in place of her body, since she has already risen. The altarpiece did not stay put. French troops carried it off to Paris in 1797, and when it returned to Italy in 1815 it went not back to Perugia but to the Vatican, where it remains.