基督受难

This Crucifixion was made to be carried, not hung. It is a processional standard, painted on both sides around 1502 so that a confraternity could raise it through the streets of Sansepolcro on feast days. The front shows Christ on the cross with Mary Magdalene clinging to its foot. The reverse has Saint Anthony Abbot and John the Evangelist, with the brothers of the confraternity kneeling small beneath them. Signorelli was working in the home town of Piero della Francesca, the painter whose grave, ordered geometry had shaped the whole region a generation earlier, and you can feel that inheritance in these firm, sculptural bodies. Today the banner rests in the town's civic museum, the same Sansepolcro it was made to be paraded through.