Peter Perugino
Pietro di Cristoforo Vanucci, known as El Perugino (Città della Pieve, c. 1448-Fontignano, February or March 1523), was an Italian painter of the fourteenth century, in transition to the High Renaissance. The nickname Il Perugino ("the Perugino") comes from his native Perugia (in Spanish, Perugia). The two fundamental influences on him were Piero della Francesca and Verrocchio, although filtered through the soft modes of Umbrian painting, of whose school he was a leader. He was the owner of two very active contemporary workshops, one in Florence and the other in Perugia. His fame was overshadowed by that of his most prestigious student, Rafael.
Biography
Training
He was born Pietro Vannucci in Città della Pieve, Umbria, the son of Cristoforo Vannucci. Contrary to what Vasari claims, the Vannucci family was one of the most important and wealthy in the Castel della Pieve. His date of birth is unknown and, through mentions by Vasari and Giovanni Santi of the age of his death, it is made to range between 1445 and 1452. No youth production is known in his hometown. His training, after a first contact with the Perusian artistic reality, proceeds, according to what Giorgio Vasari writes, with the study of the great works of Piero della Francesca such as the Polyptych of San Antonio (1459- 1468) that were scattered in Umbria, the Marches and Tuscany, assuming their characteristic light and monumentality, integrating the rigorous architecture and the characters. Vannucci took the harmony between the surface and the volume of the painting from Piero della Francesca. Perugia was at that time a vital artistic city, where, in addition to Piero, Domenico Veneziano, Beato Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli worked. With these examples, local painters, including Benedetto Bonfigli, developed a bright and ornate painting, with a fluid narrative.
Pietro Vannucci's first Umbrian artistic experiences were probably supported by local workshops such as those of Bartolomeo Caporali and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and the environment of the workshop of the aforementioned Benedetto Bonfligli.
Pietro had a first stay in Florence whose date is not fixed with certainty; some place it in the year 1470, others push the date back to the year 1479. A document places him back in Città della Pieve to pay the wine tax after the death of his father. He soon had to return to Florence, where, according to Vasari's testimony, he worked in the most important training center for young talents that existed at the time, Andrea Verrocchio's workshop, where painting, sculpture and goldsmithing were practiced. There he worked side by side with young talents such as Leonardo da Vinci, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi and, especially the little more than contemporary Botticelli, who the Anonymous Magliabechiano (circa 1540) quoted, perhaps with too much emphasis, as Perugino's direct teacher. Artistic training in Florence was then based above all on the practice of drawing from life, considered a fundamental activity of any artistic practice, which led to in-depth anatomical studies, often with the direct study of dissected corpses. Due to the assiduous attention to graphic aspects, the Florentine school of the time was very attentive to the line of the contours, which came slightly marked, as in the works of the Pollaiolo brothers or Verrocchio himself. There the young painter became familiar with with the new approaches to the treatment of the body and space; Verrocchio contributed naturalism and linear modes.
By the year 1472 he had completed his apprenticeship, which in the statutes of the arts of the time was set at no less than nine years, for which reason Perugino enrolled in the Compagnia di San Luca in Florence with the title of «dipintore», therefore he could already work autonomously.
Early works
Perugino was one of the first to use oil paint in Italy. Perugino's first activity has been reconstructed solely on the basis of stylistic comparisons. The first works are considered to be those in which the search for expression through linear drawing is stronger, of clear Florentine ancestry, while little by little those works where a transition towards the style begins to manifest themselves are placed in later years. modern», based on a greater formal purity, with attention to compositional harmony and a more morbid and diffused use of colours, which was later affirmed in the Rome of Julius II and Leo X. It is in fact Perugino who is attributes this achievement, picked up and developed by the later great masters who lived between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
A very first work is the Virgin and Child (Madonna Gambier Parry) from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where the influences of his first production are evident: importation frontal and attentive to volume derived from Piero della Francesca, simplicity of decoration, clear chiaroscuro in the style of Verrocchio; The technique and typology of the Virgin's face shows a flamenco influence, while the elements that would become typical of her art are already found, such as the rhythmic cadence of the pose and gestures and the melancholic sense that pervades the entire painting.
San Bernardino
Perugino returned from Florence to Perugia, where his Florentine training is shown in early works such as the Scenes from the life of Saint Bernardino, commissioned from him in 1473 by the Franciscans of Perugia, very determined to spread the cult of San Bernardino de Siena (canonized in the year 1450). Eight tablets were painted, dispersed today, in which several artists intervened, recognizing the intervention of Perugino as the two best quality tablets: that of the Miracle of the Stillborn Child and, above all, that of San Bernardino heals a girl. In it, the monumental and decorated architecture prevails over the small human figures, and a smooth and very clear light predominates that comes from Piero della Francesca, influenced by the Umbrian school.
In the year 1478 he continued working in Umbria, painting the frescoes in the chapel of the Magdalena in the church of Santa Maria Assunta, parish church of Cerqueto, in the surroundings of Perugia, where only fragments remain. The work, since it is a provincial reality, bears witness to its growing notoriety, with commissions of notable decorative complexity. A fragment of San Sebastián between Saints Roque and Pedro remains, the first known example of the saint pierced by arrows that becomes one of the most appreciated subjects of his production, which he painted so much in frescoes as in oil; It is a subject that allowed the representation of a young and beautiful male nude, with a religious excuse. The work served as a model for numerous replicas for private devotion, being able to cite among the best known those of Stockholm and Saint Petersburg. In the San Sebastián of the National Museum of Stockholm, a typically Umbrian Nordic landscape (c. 1490) can be seen; the Saint Sebastian of the Hermitage (c. 1495) is atypical insofar as there is only one arrow, on which some Latin words also appear: PETRUS PERUSINUS PINXIT ("Pietro Perugino has painted").
Also from this period are several Virgins or Madonnas that are scattered throughout numerous European museums. Many of them had long been attributed to Verrocchio. In all of them the influences received from his two teachers, Piero della Francesca and Verrocchio, will be mixed.
In Rome
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As he had achieved notable fame, around the year 1479, Sixtus IV called him to Rome, where he painted the apse of the Chapel of the Conception, in the choir of the Vatican Basilica; this work was destroyed in 1609 when the reconstruction of the basilica was undertaken. From the documents in the archive it is known that the cycle represented the Virgin and Child in a mandorla, surrounded by the saints Peter, Paul (in the act of presenting him to Pope Sixtus), Francis and Antonio de Padua.
It was such a success that the pope soon after commissioned it to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Starting in the summer of 1481, a group of the best Florentine painters met, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli, with their respective collaborators. It was a joint work in which the painters had to respect common conventions so that the result was homogeneous: a common scale of dimensions, the same rhythmic structure, identical landscape representation, a single chromatic range and gold finishes of so that the painting shimmered in the light of the torches and candles. Of his intervention are preserved Portraits of Popes, Return of Moses to Egypt and circumcision of Eliezer (often attributed to Luca Signorelli), the Baptism of Christ (the only signed work in the entire chapel) and, in 1481-82, the famous Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter, possibly Perugino's best-known work and one of the masterpieces on the north wall of the Sistine. In the center of the composition is Jesus Christ giving the keys to a kneeling Saint Peter; on both sides are distributed the apostles and other characters. In the background are represented the episodes of the payment of tribute, to the left and to the right of the attempted stoning of Christ, to which the upper inscription refers: CONTURBATIO IESU CHRISTI LEGISLATORIS.
It is believed that the person on the right in the foreground and with the black cap is the self-portrait of Perugino. The background is made up of a scenographic apparatus of great impact, where nothing is accidental but subject to perfect intellectual control. There the passion for the representation of architectural details is discovered, already present in the Life of San Bernardino, with two triumphal arches, an evident homage to the Arch of Constantine, and with a small temple in the middle, a transposition ideal of the Temple of Jerusalem.
Perugino, who had Pinturicchio as a collaborator, was one of the youngest in the group but soon obtained a pre-eminent position in the working group, assuming the direction. This demonstrates the favor that his art was finding, made of an innovative interpretation of classicism, showing the influence of Piero della Francesca in the application of perspective and in the solemnity of the composition, as opposed to the purely drawing-oriented conception of Botticelli or of the structure. solid and robust from Ghirlandaio.
In the right area of the altar he painted a fake altarpiece, with the theme of the Assumption and the kneeling pope as principal, a work later destroyed to make room for Michelangelo's Last Judgment along with two other boxes on the same part, dedicated to the Birth and discovery of Moses and to the Birth of Christ. The Assumption is known from a drawing by a student of Pinturicchio, which shows the prototype of that way of dividing space into two parallel planes almost without communicating, one upper and one lower, which was widely replicated by the artist in later works such as the Albani Torlonia Polyptych (1491) or the Vallombrosa Altarpiece (1500).
The Heyday
After completing the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, Perugino returned to Florence, where he worked mainly between 1486 and 1499, although during this period he made one trip to Rome and several to Perugia. He rarely had permanent help, preferring to recruit directly in the places where he traveled, allowing his style to accommodate the local context from time to time. Having overcome the Verrocchiesque roughness of his early works, the light became ever more diffuse in this period, and the landscapes abandoned their roughness in favor of gentle undulating hills, without time or place. His solemn compositions were highly successful, as they responded in the most suitable mode for the interior visualization practices of the prayer manuals, very widespread at the end of the XV century. They claimed as support images with figures and precise places in the sacred scene that he visualized internally; This led Perugino to build figures with indefinite expressions inserted in the generic landscape backgrounds, a result accentuated by the use of a rich but diffuse chromatic range. The fantasy characters he created have a refined elegance and a morbid pictorial sweetness.
His best portraits are from this period, in which he demonstrated an acute spirit of analytical observation, capable of even investigating psychology. His skill as a portrait painter is evident in the portraits of Fra Baldassarre and Don Biagio Milanesi, from the convent of Vallombrosa, and in that of Francesco delle Opere from 1494 (it is signed and dated on the back), a masterpiece by Perugino, in which the figure has a meticulously detailed landscape in the background that demonstrates the Flemish influence. His influence on Raphael's portraits is evident.
A trip to Venice in 1494 allowed him to admire the heyday of the local school with the works of Vittore Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini, which influenced his later production.
Florence
His workshop in Florence received a large number of commissions. His work acquires greater maturity, with large compositions inserted in large open spaces.
In the year 1483 he participated in the most ambitious decorative program prepared by Lorenzo the Magnificent, the decoration of the villa di Spedaletto, in the surroundings of Volterra, where the best Florentine artists of the time met: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi and Perugino. The scenes, which had a mythological character, were completely lost. Around 1485 he produced the Galitzin Triptych.
He entered the Laurentian circle, where his ideally harmonious painting could only be appreciated for its close analogy with the philosophy of the Neoplatonic Academy. This influence resulted in a work with a mythological theme that is in the Louvre; traditionally it has been called Apollo and Marsyas, although nowadays the seated figure tends to be identified with the Sicilian shepherd Daphnis. Although stylistically some place it around the year 1500, it is thought to be the work of Lorenzo the Magnificent (died in 1492), to whom allusions to the laurel would be dedicated. The figures, immersed in a landscape of calm harmony, are sweetly polished, and quote classic works: if Apollo imitates Praxiteles' Hermes, the seated figure (Marsyas or Daphnis) reminds Lysippus' Ares.
The crisis unleashed after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with the re-establishment of the Florentine Republic inflamed by the sermons of Jerome Savonarola probably affected him only indirectly. There is no clear break in his art between the earlier mode and the dramatic events of the 1490s. After all, his art was already adapted to simplicity and religious intensity without superfluous distractions. He was then the ideal painter of a devotional language made of simple forms, but all together still harmonious and beautiful, not austere.
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He created a series of large panels for the Ingesuati convent of San Giusto, located outside the walls of Florence, frescoes and panel paintings: Crucifixion with Saints (c. 1485-1490), Christ in the Garden (c. 1492) and Pieta (c. 1493-94). They are tables made at the time when Savonarola delivered apocalyptic sermons that terrified the population. He painted a Last Supper al fresco for the refectory of the nuns of Fuligno. In these works he began to use an architectural framing of the figures under a portico, often identical in design, with simple but solemn shapes, open on a landscape that expanded space thanks to the use of aerial perspective, often taken to a mastery with the delicate chords of water green and blue. The figures in the foreground assume an increasing importance, becoming the measure that defines the spatial and volumetric relationships of the entire painting. Another example of this is The vision of San Bernardo (c. 1489-1494), made for the chapel that the Nasi family had in Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi in Florence, with Umbrian reminiscences in the treatment of landscape that opens in the center of the painting.
In Florence he married Chiara Fancelli in 1493, model for so many of his Virgins. By then his Florentine workshop surpassed in fame even those of the best local painters, such as Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Domenico Ghirlandaio, even receiving orders from other principalities to which his fame was spreading.
The faces of the Virgins in these nineties mature, they are more simple and severe, instead of the refined and elegant young women of previous works. An example of this is the Virgin and Child and Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian painted in 1493 for the church of San Domenico in Fiesole and currently kept in the Uffizi. It is an example of his soft style, clearly presenting the figures under an arcade and is perhaps the first in the series, or The Virgin with Child and Two Saints (c. 1493-95), made for at the time that the Perugino worked in the church of San Pedro in Perugia, while Raphael was in his workshop, and which today is preserved in the Kunsthistorisches. From 1493 to 1496 he frescoed the Crucifixion for the chapter of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi (Florence). From between 1494 and 1495 is the Pietà for the Florentine nunnery of Santa Clara, a work that is currently in the Palatine Gallery of the Pitti Palace, an atypically stark work that eludes Perugino's piety, although sometimes too easily sentimental. The Vallombrosa Altarpiece, today in the Accademia Gallery, dates from the year 1500.
To what extent these religious works corresponded with his personal beliefs or an adherence to Savonarola's moral principles is something that can be known. Vasari denied that he had a real interest in religious matters, recalling that instead he devoted himself to earthly pleasures, and that he was incapable of attending to reason when it came to issues such as the immortality of the soul, in which he did not believe.. Vasari is the main, though not the only, authority by which Perugino is said to have been scarcely religious, and it is hard not to believe him when Vasari was born twenty years before Perugino's death, and must have spoken to many people who knew the painter well. from Umbria.
Perugia
Numerous masterpieces also emerged from the Perugia workshop. Between the end of 1495 and 1496, the Altarpiece of the Decemvirs, so called because it was commissioned by the decemvirs of Perugia for the chapel of the Public Palace. The Virgin with Child and Saints Lorenzo, Ludovico de Tolosa, Herculano and Constancio (1495-1496) are preserved in the Vatican Pinacoteca from this altarpiece.
Much more refined was the polyptych of the Ascension of Christ or Polyptych of Saint Peter, painted around 1496–98 for the church of Saint Peter in Perugia, (currently in the Municipal Museum, Lyon). This work was dismembered in 1591, after the destruction of the church: in the center was the Ascension with the Virgin, the Apostles and the Angels, above God in glory, on the predella the tables with the Adoration of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, the Resurrection and two panels with the saints protectors of Perugia. On the predella, on the base of the columns that flanked the Ascension, they were placed in six panels with Benedictine saints. Among them were Saint Benedict, Saint Flavia and Saint Placido (1496-1499), today in the Vatican Art Gallery.
In subsequent years he delved into these aspects of his art, with greater mastery and fully "classical" formulas in the representation of human figures. However, there was no lack of criticism, such as that of Michelangelo, who accused him of being a "clumsy painter" ( goffo nell arte ): Vannucci sued him before the Court of Eight, but without success. Willing to give his best, he produced his masterpiece of the Virgin and Saints for the Charterhouse of Pavia. The chronology is not clear, but it seems that the commission dates back to 1496 but should not have been finished until 1499. Filippino Lippi died without carrying out the commission and Perugino himself did not finish it either, and it had to be completed with two panels by Albertinelli. Today it is disarmed and scattered among various museums: the only portion in the Cartuja is God the Father with cherubs. Three panels are kept in the National Gallery, London, where they are arranged in the form of a triptych: Madonna with Saint Michael and Saint Raphael. There are those who see in this work the hand of Rafael. Of course, there is a model of the Virgin that is typical of Perugino and that Raphael would later imitate in her works: with almond-shaped eyes and a small but fleshy mouth.
The College of Change
Special mention deserves the masterpiece, highly praised by its contemporaries, produced in the Room of Change in Perugia. In 1496 the brotherhood of the cambio (changers or bankers) of Perugia asked him to decorate their audience hall (sala dell'udienza). Perugino was responsible for the drawings and his students were most likely the ones who executed them. He added his self-portrait in the form of a bust on the half pilaster of the room, with a few words in which he defines himself as Petrus Perusinus egregius pictor, and it is dated AD MD (1500 A.D.. In this work the painter takes his expressive possibilities to the maximum. He transposes literary, humanistic and classical concepts into harmonic and serene images, rhythmically alternated in a progression reminiscent of musical composition. The colors are bright but wisely harmonized. The technique shows a brushstroke that divides the light into infinite segments, which vibrate, breaking down and recomposing themselves in the final unitary effect.The theatrical lighting and the studied perspective aroused intense emotions among contemporaries.Although it is a masterpiece, the limits of his art remain evident: the reiteration of repertoire composition schemes and the difficulty of representing dynamic narrative scenes.
The humanist Francesco Maturanzio acted as his adviser; the theme of the cycle is the agreement between pagan wisdom and Christian wisdom. He understood the painting of the vault with the seven planets and the signs of the Zodiac, among grotesque decorations. And on the walls two sacred themes are represented: the Nativity and the Transfiguration; in addition, the Eternal Father among angels above a group with prophets and sibyls, the cardinal virtues of Prudence and Justice over six ancient sages and Fortitude and Temperance on six ancient heroes, Cato as the emblem of wisdom, and numerous life-size figures of classical subjects, prophets, and sibyls appeared on the program.
At this time the artist is widely appreciated, with his language he influenced many artists, even famous ones, who tried to give their art a classicist direction. Princes, rulers and great lords made him numerous commissions, which had to be carried out by the workshop, with the creation of autograph works only moderately and on certain occasions. At that time, the young Raphael was being trained in that workshop, whose youthful works are sometimes confused with those of Perugino. Raphael took from Perugino the foundations of his subsequent evolution: the conception of perspective and composition.
Last years
In the passage between one century and another, Perugino's art had reached its peak. It is at this time that he returns to the compositional scheme of The delivery of the keys to Saint Peter in The Betrothal of the Virgin (c. 1501-1504), made for the chapel del Santo Anello in the Cathedral of Perugia, today in the museum of Caen. He was undoubtedly the model for Raphael's homonymous work of close dates and which is in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. However, the attribution is currently in doubt, considering that it may be from a disciple, Lo Spagna.
Along with these great works he continues to produce small paintings for private devotion such as the Virgin and Child of Washington (1501). Rare then is the production in the field of miniatures, with the creation in this period of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in the Horae Albani codex, today in London, where he used a loose style.
But tastes were changing and his works were no longer liked as before. In January 1503, the Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d'Este, after having searched through her emissaries for the best artists active in the Florentine square, chose Perugino to produce one of the allegorical paintings for her Studiolo in the castle of San Giorgio, in Mantua. It is about the episode of The combat between Love and Chastity, which was to be inserted in a complex with other works by Andrea Mantegna and other painters. It was a very elaborate work, with the continuous supervision of Leonbruno from Mantua. The Marchioness, upon delivery of it, was not fully satisfied. The lively scene turned out to be, apart from the landscape, a bit confusing, the artist not being comfortable with figures of small dimensions and with the representation of movement.
The same thing happened with the altarpiece he made in Florence for the Basilica of the Santísima Annunciata, which he had to take over on the death of Filippino Lippi in 1504. The result was fiercely criticized since it repeated previous compositions. Vasari recounted that the painter defended himself like this: «I have presented in the work the figures that you have all praised on other occasions and that had pleased you infinitely: if now they do not please you, and you do not praise them anymore, what can I do?».
In fact, in those years Perugino had accentuated the use and reuse of the same cartoons, prevailing the pictorial execution over the intervention. But with the new century, the variety of invention was considered a fundamental element of artistic creation, to the point of marking the difference between first-rate artists and second-rate ones. Perugino found himself surpassed, while the era of the great success of Leonardo da Vinci opened and, shortly thereafter, of other geniuses such as Michelangelo and his student Raphael. He was not the only artist who found it difficult to renew his own style and to be able to follow the extraordinary novelty of those years: Luca Signorelli, Vittore Carpaccio and, for other reasons, Sandro Botticelli also experienced a similar crisis. In the great Italian centers (Florence, Rome and Venice) the novelty often manifested itself one after the other, at a very rapid pace and those works that did not imply novelty were rejected. The Altarpiece of the Annunciation was Perugino's last Florentine work.
Around 1506 he definitively abandoned Florence, going to Perugia. In 1507, despite being in a decadent period, he created one of his best works, the Madonna between Saint Jerome and Saint Francis , currently in the Palazzo Della Penna in Perugia. Pope Julius II called Perugino to paint the room of the Fire of the Borgo in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican. He painted four tondoes with the Holy Trinity, the Creator enthroned between angels and cherubs, Christ as Sol Iustitiae and Christ tempted by the devil, Christ between Mercy and Justice (1508). But even the pope was not fully satisfied, and he soon preferred a younger competitor, Raphael, who had been trained by Perugino. Vannucci withdrew from Rome in 1512.
Exiled from the great artistic centers, Perugino worked in the small centers of Umbria, where his style was still appreciated. However, there was a progressive impoverishment of his art, which reiterated previous compositions with more success. The participation of assistants explains the inequalities in the quality of the paintings from these years. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the works of the last twenty years of Perugino's life as a simple series of repetitive and monotonous works, including examples of greatness and genius, and the level of pictorial technique always remaining extremely high, as the Polyptych of San Agustín, which he painted in two phases, which made it possible to date other works following the evolution of the master throughout the years 1512 to 1517; it is currently scattered.
Perugino's latest production is linked above all to devotional frescoes in small towns in Umbria: the Pieta of Spello and the Adoration of the Shepherds for the Madonna delle Lacrime in Trevi (1521, signed and dated), whose Madonna was repeated even in the Madonna enthroned always in Spello and in the Madonna with Child in the oratory of the Announced in Fontignano, around Perugia, his last work.
He was still in Fontignano when he died of the plague. Like other victims, he was hastily buried in unconsecrated ground, the exact location being currently unknown. He died in possession of considerable property, leaving behind three children.
The most outstanding student he had was Raphael, in whose early works the influence of Perugino is most noticeable. Giovanni di Pietro (called lo Spagna) was also a student of his.
Style
Perugino was the initiator of a new way of painting that was called maniera moderna (“modern style”), marking the taste of an entire era. The main characteristics of the new style are: formal purity, the serenity of the large compositions, the well-defined and elegant drawing, the light color, full of light and with refined modulations of chiaroscuro, the characters freed from earthly characteristics and invested with of an "angelic and very sweet air".
His art is made of harmonies and silences, of sweetly faded colors, of carefully studied perspectives, of figures full of delicate grace and sweet melancholy, of ideal balance.
The entrepreneur and the role of the workshop
Throughout his life, Perugino was an indefatigable worker and an excellent organizer of the workshop, leaving behind numerous works. Some consider him to be the first artist-"entrepreneur" capable of managing two very active workshops at the same time: one in Florence, open since the 1970s XV, where Raphael, Rocco Zoppo and the Bacchiacca were trained, and another in Perugia, opened in the year 1501, from which a whole generation of painters from the Umbrian school emerged who widely disseminated their artistic language. In addition, Perugino received numerous commissions from other Italian cities, such as Lucca, Cremona, Venice, Bologna, Ferrara, Milan and Mantua, not forgetting his important stays in Rome and the Marches.
To ensure continuous work, Perugino had extensively organized the phases of artistic production and the use of assistants. The works were started, they were suspended and then they were resumed several times, so that they carried out many orders without ever running out of work. The most complex and prestigious parts were reserved for the master, while some accessory parts, such as the backgrounds and predellas, were entrusted to the assistants, thus speeding up the execution time. The design of the composition was always by the teacher, who created graphic schemes and the preparatory cartoons.
The intervention of many hands in a single painting was organized in such a way that the quality and unity of the work did not decline, following the same style.
Frequent repetition of themes and compositions was not then considered a lack of inventiveness, but was even specifically sought after by clients.
Critical Appraisal
Pietro Vannucci's contemporaries considered him the greatest among the protagonists of that renewal of Italian art at the height of the Renaissance, between the last decades of the century XV and early XVI. His innovations and the extraordinary level of quality of his art were well understood, so much so that by the end of the XV century he was unanimously considered the greatest painter in Italy. For example, Agostino Chigi, in a letter to his father Mariano dated November 7, 1500, describes Perugino as "the best master in Italy", and Vasari, in his Lives of artists of the In the year 1568 he wrote how his painting "was so popular in his time that many came from France, Spain, Germany and other provinces to learn it".
After a golden age, his art suffered a crisis, being poorly known and criticized, accused of formalism, repetition and hypocrisy. At the base of these changes was the failure of works such as The combat between Love and Chastity for the Marquise of Mantua or the Altarpiece of the Blessed Annunciation for Florence.
Only with the studies of the 19th and 20th centuries, his figure was located in the position that he legitimately deserved within Italian art, once again understanding his innovative capacity. Soon the scientific studies on the author have known again phases of stagnation, marginal attention and misunderstanding. With the spread of the historical avant-garde and with the revolutions in contemporary art, Perugino, as an exponent of "classical" taste, has often been despised, since he was far from the canons of contemporary taste.
More recently, interest in his art has been renewed, but linked above all to the resurgence of studies on the young Raphael, or with specific and sectoral contributions that still do not provide a complete picture of the artistic-historical importance of this painter. An opportunity to rediscover him was the great monographic exhibition on the painter that was dedicated to him by the National Gallery of Umbria in 2004.
Main works
- Crucifixion (Triptic Galitzin, 1480) — Painted for San Domenico in San Gimignano, National Gallery in Washington
- Delivery of keys to San Pedro (1481–1482) - Fresco, 335 × 600 cm, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City
- Christ in the garden (h. 1483-1495) - Oil on board, 166 × 171 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- Pity (1483-1495) - Oil on panel, 168 × 176 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- San Sebastián (h. 1490) - Oil on board, 174 × 88 cm, National Museum, Stockholm
- Madonna (1490) — 90 × 66 cm, Capodimonte Museum, Naples
- Apollo and Marsias (h. 1490-1492) - Oil on panel, 39 × 29 cm, Louvre Museum, Paris
- San Sebastián (h. 1490-1500) — Panel, 176 × 116 cm, Louvre, Paris
- Virgin with the Child between the Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (1493) - Oil on panel, 178 × 164 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- The Virgin with the Child and two saints (1493) - Oil on board, 86.5 × 63 cm, Kunsthistorisches, Vienna
- The vision of San Bernardo (1493) - Oil on panel, 173 × 170 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
- San Sebastián (1493–1494) - Oil and temple on board, 53.5 × 39.5 cm, Ermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
- Portrait of Francesco delle Opere (1494) - Temple on board, 52 × 44 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- Crucifixion (1494-1496) - Fresco, 480 × 812 cm, church of Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, Florence
- Portrait of boy (h. 1495) - Oil on board, 37 × 26 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- St. Benedict. Santa Flavia. San Plácido (1495-1498) - Oil on panel, Vatican Pinacoteca, Vatican City
- Madonna (h. 1497) - Oil on board, 44 × 34 cm, Borghese Gallery, Rome
- Frescos del Collegio del Cambio en Perugia (1497-1500) - Frescos, Collegio del Cambio, Perugia
- Madonna with San Miguel and San Rafael (h. 1499) - Oil on board, 126.5 × 58 cm, National Gallery, London
- Pala di Vallombrosa (1500) - Oil on panel, 415 × 246 cm, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence
- Portrait of Don Biagio Milanesi (1500) - Oil on panel, 28 × 26 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- Portrait of Fra Baldassarre (1500) - Oil on board, 26 × 27 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
- Marriage of the Virgin (1500–1504) - Oil on panel, 234 × 185, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen
- The Archangel and Tobias (1500–1505) - Oil and temple on board, 113.3 × 56.5 cm, National Gallery of London
- San Sebastian tied to a column (h. 1500–1510) - Oil on canvas, 181 × 115 cm, São Paulo Art Museum, São Paulo, Brazil
- The Fight between Love and Castity (1503) - Temple on board, 160 x 191 cm, Lovre Museum, Paris
- (Peruvian and assistants): Martirio de San Sebastián (h. 1506) - Oil on board, 110 × 62 cm, Borghese Gallery, Rome
- Baptism of Christ (1510) - Oil on board, Duomo de Città della Pieve
- The Nativity: the Virgin, Saint Joseph and the shepherds worshiping the Child Jesus (h. 1522) - Fresco transferred to canvas from S. Maria Assunta, in Fontignano, 254 x 594 cm, Victoria and Alberto Museum, London
- Virgin crowned by angels (1523) National Museum of San Carlos Mexico City
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