St Augustine's Church

This scene is frequently depicted in art. We have two versions of it in our own church: the upper right hand panel of our reredos and in stained glass. Perhaps the most famous depiction of the scene is the cover illustration painted by the Umbrian artist known as Perugino which is in the Sistine Chapel. A surprising amount of Perugino’s work has not survived him. His first major commission was a series of frescoes in San Giusto’s church in Florence which was destroyed during the 1539 Siege of Florence. In 1480 he painted a chapel in the old St Peter’s which was then demolished in 1506 to make way for the St Peter’s we have today. While he was painting this chapel Pope Sixtus IV saw his work and brought him in to fresco the walls of his newly constructed Sistine chapel. Perugino worked alongside other artists like Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Signorelli on a series of frescoed panels depicting scriptural scenes. It must have been a mark of the esteem in which he was held that Perugino was chosen to do the principal panels on the east wall of the chapel above the altar where he painted Moses in the Bulrushes, the Nativity and the Assumption. Sadly, in 1535 that wall was cleared to make was for another work, Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. Many of his frescoes and altarpieces do survive, however, and among the most famous is this scene on the north wall of the Sistine Chapel. If click on the image on the image on the Delivery of the Keys - Wikipedia you can see the whole image in colour and in extraordinary detail … and then imagine his paintings that are lost!