Pietro Perugino (Città della Pieve, Umbria, 1446–1524) is a
well-known painter of the Umbrian school, who developed some of the
qualities that found classic expression in the High Renaissance. He was
the son of Cristoforo Vannucci; his nickname characterizes him as from
Perugia, the chief city of Umbria. By the age of nine, Pietro was articled
to a master, a painter at Perugia. Benedetto Bonfigli is generally
surmised to be the man; if he is rejected as not being above mediocrity,
either Fiorenzo di Lorenzo or Niccolò da Foligno may possibly have been
the man.
Pietro painted at Arezzo, thence moved to Florence. The date of this first
Florentine sojourn is by no means settled; some make it as early as 1470,
others push the date to 1479. According to Vasari, he apprenticed in the
atelier of Andrea del Verrocchio alongside Leonardo de Vinci. He may have
learned perspective from Piero della Francesca. In 1472 he must have
completed his apprenticeship, for he was enrolled as a painter in the
confraternity of St Luke.
Perugino was one of the earliest Italian practitioners of oil painting.
Some of his early works were extensive frescoes for the convent of the
Ingesati fathers, destroyed during the siege of Florence, 1537; he
produced for them also many cartoons, which they executed with brilliant
effect in stained glass. A good specimen of his early style in tempera is
the tondo (circular picture) in the Louvre of the Virgin and Child
Enthroned between Saints.
Perugino in Rome
Perugino returned from Florence to Perugia, where his Florentine training
showed in the Adoration of the Magi for the church of Santa Maria dei
Servi (ca 1476). In about 1480, he was called to Rome to fresco panels for
the Sistine Chapel walls by Sixtus IV including Moses and Zipporah (often
attributed to Luca Signorelli), the Baptism of Christ, and Christ Giving
the Keys to Peter (illustration, right). Pinturicchio accompanied Perugino
to Rome, and was made his partner, receiving a third of the profits. He
may have done some of the Zipporah subject. The Sistine frescoes were the
major high renaissance Patronage in Rome. The altar wall was also painted
with the Assumption, the Nativity, and Moses in the Bulrushes. These works
were later ruthlessly destroyed to make a space for Michelangelo Last
Judgement,
Perugino, age forty, left Rome after completion of the Sistine Chapel work
in 1486, and by autumn was in Florence. Here he figures by no means
advantageously in a criminal court. In July 1487 he and another Perugian
painter named Aulista di Angelo were convicted, on their own confession,
of having in December waylaid with staves someone (the name does not
appear) in the streets near Pietro Maggiore. Perugino merely intended
assault and battery, but Aulista meant to commit murder. The more
illustrious culprit, guilty of the lesser offence, was fined ten gold
florins, and the other was exiled for life.
Between 1486 and 1499 Perugino worked chiefly in Florence, making one
journey to Rome and several to Perugia, where he may have maintained a
second studio. He had an established studio in Florence, and received a
great number of commissions. His Pietà (1495) in the Palazzo Pitti is an
uncharacteristically stark work that avoids Perugino's sometimes too easy
sentimental piety.
In 1499 the guild of the cambio (money-changers or bankers) of Perugia
asked him to decorate their audience-hall. This extensive scheme, which
may have been finished by 1500, comprised the painting of the vault with
the seven planets and the signs of the zodiac (Perugino being responsible
for the designs and his pupils most probably for the execution) and the
representation on the walls of two sacred subjects: the Nativity and
Transfiguration; in addition, the Eternal Father, the cardinal virtues of
Justice, Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude, Cato as the emblem of wisdom,
and numerous life-sized figures of classic worthies, prophets and sibyls
figured in the program. On the mid-pilaster of the hall Perugino placed
his own portrait in bust-form . It is probable that Raphael, who in
boyhood, towards 1496, had been placed by his uncles under the tuition of
Perugino, bore a hand in the work of the vaulting.
About this time or a few years later Perugino was made one of the priors
of Perugia in 1501. Michelangelo, twenty-five years of age in 1500,
following after and distancing Leonardo da Vinci, was opening men's eyes
and minds to possibilities of achievement as yet unsurmised. Michelangelo
on one occasion, in company, he told Perugino to his face that he was a
bungler in art (goffo nell arte): Vannucci brought an action for
defamation of character, unsuccessfully. Put on his mettle by this
mortifying transaction, he determined to show what he could do, and he
produced the masterpiece of the Madonna and Saints for the Certosa of
Pavia, now disassembled and scattered among museums: the only portion in
the Certosa is God the Father with cherubim. An Annunciation has
disappeared; three panels, the Virgin adoring the infant Christ, St
Michael, and St Raphael with Tobias, are among the treasures of the
National Gallery, London. This was succeeded in 1505 by an Assumption, in
the Cappella dei Rabatta, in the church of the Servi in Florence. The
painting may have been executed chiefly by a pupil, and was at any rate a
failure: it was much decried; Perugino lost his students; and towards 1506
he once more and finally abandoned Florence, going to Perugia, and thence
in a year or two to Rome.
Pope Julius II had summoned Perugino to paint the Stanza of the Incendio
del Borgo in the Vatican City; but he soon preferred a younger competitor,
Raphael, who had been trained by Perugino; and Vannucci, after painting
the ceiling with figures of God the Father in different glories, in five
medallion-subjects, retired from Rome to Perugia from 1512. Among his
latest works, many of which decline into repetitious studio routine, one
of the best is the extensive altarpiece (painted between 1512 and 1517) of
the church of San Agostino in Perugia, also now dispersed.
Perugino's last frescoes were painted for the church of the Madonna delle
Lacrime in Trevi (1521, signed and dated), the monastery of Sant'Agnese in
Perugia, and in 1522 for the church of Castello di Fortignano. Both series
have disappeared from their places, the second being now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum. He was still at Fontignano in 1524 when he died of the
the plague. Like other plague victims, he was hastily buried in an
unconsecrated field, the precise spot now unknown.
Vasari is our chief, but not sole, authority for saying Perugino had very
little religion, and openly doubted the soul's immortality. For a reader
of the present day it is easier than it was for Vasari to suppose that
Perugino may have been a materialist, and yet just as laudable a man as
his brother-artists.
It is difficult to reconcile this discrepancy, and certainly not a little
difficult also to suppose that Vasari was totally mistaken in his
assertion; he was born twenty years before Perugino's death, and must have
talked with scores of people to whom the Umbrian painter had been well
known. We have to remark that Perugino in 1494 painted his own portrait
(illustration, upper right), now in the Uffizi Gallery, and into this he
introduced a scroll lettered Timete Deum. That an open disbeliever should
inscribe himself with Timete Deum seems odd. The portrait in question
shows a plump face, with small dark eyes, a short but well-cut nose, and
sensuous lips; the neck is thick, the hair bushy and frizzled, and the
general air imposing. The later portrait in the Cambio of Perugia shows
the same face with traces of added years. Perugino died possessed of
considerable property, leaving three sons.
In 1495 he signed and dated a Deposition for the Florentine convent of
Santa Chiara (Palazzo Pitti). Towards 1496 he frescoed the Crucifixion,
commission in 1493 in S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, Florence (the "Pazzi
Crucifixion"). The attribution to him of the picture of the marriage
of Joseph and the Virgin Mary (the Sposalizio) now in the museum of Caen,
which indisputably served as the original, to a great extent, of the still
more famous Sposalizio painted by Raphael in 1504 (Accademia di Brera,
Milan), is now questioned, and it is assigned to Lo Spagna. A vastly finer
work of Perugino's was the polyptych of the Ascension of Christ painted ca
1496–98 for the church of S. Pietro of Perugia, (Municipal Museum,
Lyon); the other portions of the same altarpiece are dispersed in other
galleries.
In the chapel of the Disciplinati of Città della Pieve is an Adoration of
the Magi, a square of 21 ft. containing about thirty life-sized figures;
this was executed, with scarcely credible celerity, from the 1st to 25th
of March (or thereabouts) in 1505, and must no doubt be in great part the
work of Vannucci's pupils. In 1507, when the master's work had for years
been in a course of decline and his performances were generally weak, he
produced. nevertheless, one of his best; pictures — the Virgin between
Saint Jerome and Saint Francis, how in the Palazzo Penna. In the church of
S. Onofrio in Florence is a much lauded and much debated fresco of the
Last Supper, a careful and blandly correct but uninspired work; it has
been ascribed to Perugino by some connoisseurs, by others to Raphael; it
may more probably be by some different pupil of the Umbrian master.
In addition to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, see Di Pietro Perugino e degli
scolari (1804); Mezzanotte, Vita, etc., di Pietro Vannucci (1836);
Mariotti, Lettere pittoriche Perugine (1788); Claude Phillips (in The
Portfolio) (1893); G.C. Williamson, Perugino (1900 and 1903).
Major works
St. Sebastian (c. 1490-1500) - Panel, 176 x 116 cm, Louvre, Paris
St. Sebastian (after 1490) - Oil on wood, 110 x 62 cm, Galleria Borghese,
Rome
St. Sebastian (1493-1494) - Oil and tempera on panel, 53.8 x 39.5 cm, The
Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Marriage of the Virgin (1500-1504) - Oil on wood, 234 x 185, Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Caen
Christ Delivering the Keys to St. Peter (1481-1482) - Fresco, 335 x 600
cm, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City
Crucifixion (the Galitzin triptych), painted for San Domenico at San
Gimingnano, 1480s (National Gallery, Washington)
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It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Italian Renaissance".