The Ascension of Christ

The Ascension

The last episode of the cycle. Luke closes his gospel with it and the Acts of the Apostles opens with it: after the appearances, Christ leads the disciples out, is lifted up, and a cloud takes him from their sight, with two figures in white left to address the men looking upward. The pictorial convention divides the panel horizontally — a rising figure in a mandorla above, the apostles and the Virgin gathered on the ground below.

Where it falls in the sequence

After the Resurrection and the appearances, and before Pentecost. It is the end of the life of Christ as a narrative of events on earth, and cycles that run in order finish here; anything later belongs to the history of the apostles rather than to the life.

The record

The catalogue gives Pietro Perugino as the artist and 1498 as the date of creation, with the painting at the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France. It measures 265 by 325 centimetres, a large horizontal work at altar scale. The style is entered as High Renaissance and the artist as Italian; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown. Nothing in the record concerns the commission or the church the panel came from.