Italy’s best maestro, the artist Pietro Vannucci, is always known as Perugino, after Perugia, the chief city of his native Umbria. He was born c. 1450 and a superb exhibition, celebrating the 500^th anniversary of his death in 1523, went on show at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in 2023. Paintings from around the world showed off the work of this Renaissance painter.

perugino’s early career: umbria and florence

Perugino gained his reputation as Italy’s best maestro during his own lifetime. He probably began his apprenticeship in Umbria and the artists who influenced him would have included Benedetto Bonfigli (d. 1496) and Bartolomeo Caporali (d. before 1505). At the time, they were the best artists of the Umbrian school. However, it was in Florence that Perugino reached his artistic maturity, in the workshop of Verrocchio—whose members included Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci. Perugino clearly took a lot of his pictorial ideas from the Florentines. He populates altarpiece after altarpiece with colourfully clad characters (of ambivalent gender), standing in sinuous contrapposto (the curved stance of Classical statuary), their eyes turned to heaven.

Perugino in venice and Rome

Perugino’s reputation was made when, together with a group of Florentine painters, he was called to Rome in 1481 to produce works for St Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. As a result, some of the finest connoisseurs of the age, among them Lorenzo the Magnificent and Isabella d’Este, sought his services. He was described as “Italy’s best maestro”. Patrons appreciated the special “sweetness” of his colours—a quality he is thought to have learned to convey from time spent in the lagoon light of Venice in the mid-1490s. His palette seems to suggest an everlasting sunny springtime.

perugino at the peak of his career

Perugino, in his heyday as Italy’s best maestro, was formidable and prolific and maintained a large workshop. His self-portraits reveal a stocky man, probably capable of driving a hard bargain. He had no interest in God, Vasari tells us, and he was obsessed with making money. One of his most famous works is the Marriage of the Virgin, which he painted for the cathedral of Perugia in 1504. It hung there until 1797, when Napoleon stole it and took it to France. It is still in there, in Caen. It contains many of the elements for which Perugino is distinctive: the serene and idealised backdrop; the rolling eyeballs; the elaborate headdresses; the rich colour blocks provided by the robes; and the acute portrait studies in some of the faces.

an artist who took on too much?

Perugino often overstretched himself. He might have been Italy’s best maestro, but, as Vasari tells us, “Pietro always had so much to do that he frequently repeated himself, and his theory of art led him so far that all his figures have the same air.” It is true. There are undeniable similarities between his Holy Ring and the Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter, which he painted for the Sistine Chapel in 1481–2. The Renaissance building in the centre, the enigmatic figures in the middle ground, the crowd at the front, the mountainous backdrop, the stylised trees, the mixture of idealised, androgynous faces and contemporary portraits from life. It was the formula which had made him famous and he saw no reason to diverge from it. All of its elements appear again in his Marriage of the Virgin.

Perugino’s influence on others

Perugino, at his height, was very influential. He was not Italy’s best maestro for nothing. The Marriage of the Virgin painted in the same year by Raphael (illustrated below) is nothing short of a downright copy (even though Raphael places his own signature very prominently on the central building).

In fact, Raphael—Perugino’s greatest pupil— went on to far surpass his master, even though he predeceased him.

The decline of Perugino’s fortunes

No artist can remain Italy’s best maestro forever. Perugino was a painter of the 15^th century, and as the 16^th century wore on and revolutionary younger artists began to break the old moulds, he found that recycling past successes was no longer enough. Vasari tells a story about an altarpiece which Perugino completed for the Annunziata church in Florence, after the death of Filippino Lippi. “But when this work was uncovered it was severely criticised by all the new artists, chiefly because Pietro had employed figures of which he had already made use. Even his friends declared but he had not taken pains, but had abandoned the good method of working, either from avarice or in order to save time. Pietro answered, ‘I have done the figures which you have formerly praised and which have given you great pleasure. If you are now dissatisfied and do not praise them, how can I help it?’” This was in 1507, four years after Leonardo had painted his Mona Lisa and three years since Michelangelo had sculpted his David. Perugino could not cling on forever to his spot at the top of Fortune’s wheel.

What makes Perugino unique?

And yet, in one way, Perugino will always be Italy’s best maestro. Why? Because he possessed one skill that neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could ever equal. His gift for taking a keen and vivid likeness. During his career, he painted a number of portraits. Many of them are now in the Uffizi, including his own self-portrait. And there is something about the face that is instantly knowable. You feel you’ve seen this man. Is he the municipal carpark attendant? The man behind the fish counter in the supermarket? Or perhaps he’s the waiter at the corner café? Or the man who came to fix the boiler? Back in Renaissance central Italy, he was the painter of soft and serene altarpieces, a man who loved making money and who didn’t believe in God.

ABB

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