圣塞波尔克罗祭坛画

By about 1510 Perugino was falling out of fashion. Tastes in Florence and Rome had moved on to his own former pupil Raphael and to Michelangelo, and the calm, symmetrical style Perugino had perfected now looked old. So he went back to what he knew. This Ascension for the cathedral of Sansepolcro repeats, at larger size, a composition he had already used years before, with Christ floating inside a golden almond of angels while the apostles crane upward from a soft Umbrian landscape of thin trees. Much of the surface was left to his workshop. The slender hills behind are the countryside around Perugia that he painted his whole life.