PERUGINO, PIETRO VANNUCCI detto il. - Painter, b. at Città di Castello in 1445. Despite the flourishing of studies around this artist, the problem of his formation has not yet been clarified, and every solution remains still in the realm of hypotheses; all the more so since works from his youth of certain attribution are lacking.
According to Vasari he would have completed his education under Piero della Francesca at Borgo S. Sepolcro, then moving on to Florence where, in 1472, he is enrolled in the register of painters and is at the workshop of Verrocchio. But even from this period there is a lack, except for the two
Saints in the Oratory of the Pilgrims at Assisi (1468), of works that are certain or of certain dating. Recently an attempt has been made to take away from him the authorship of the Storiette of St. Bernardino (1473) in the Pinacoteca of Perugia. For the Adoration of the Magi, in the same Pinacoteca, the dating oscillates between c. 1470 and 1475, and the St. Christopher of the Borghese Gallery is disputed with him by Pinturicchio (v.). It is therefore from the St. Sebastian of Cerqueto (1472) that one can begin his exact chronology and the development of his art, basing it on certain and dated works. With this painting we are still at the moment in the Florentine, or rather Pollaiuolesque, phase of P., when the plastic force, which takes nothing away from the elegance of the modeling, reveals him as an artist already formed and sure of his abilities. Moreover, the list of the preceding Perugian and Florentine works that have been lost - frescoes in the Convent of Porta a Pinti for Florence, the decoration of the Palazzo dei Priori in Perugia, and others - are good testimony to the fame he achieved. To these paintings must be added the apse decoration of the old basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican (1479), destroyed in the rebuilding of the church. Already during this first stay in Rome P. had come into contact with Melozzo da Forlì, whose influence is evident in some works of the following period; a period of ascent for the artist that will have its acme in the last decade of the century. From 1481 are the works in the Sistine Chapel, where he executes by himself the Delivery of the Keys and in collaboration with Pinturicchio the Circumcision of the Sons of Noah and the Baptism of Jesus; from 1488-89 the Annunciation of Fano and the Apparition of the Virgin to St. Bernard of the Munich Museum, followed by the Albani triptych with the Nativity, the two paintings depicting the Virgin with Child in Vienna and at the Uffizi, the Resurrection of Christ of the Vatican Pinacoteca (1495), an Agony in the Garden and a Pietà at the Uffizi. In all these works there is as it were a crescendo of those essential elements of his art that culminate in the great Florentine fresco in S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi: the solitary, sculptural figure of the Crucified Christ, the figures of the Virgin and the Saints, so detached and gathered in devout contemplation and which express a sense of mystical religiosity, find a counterpart in the landscape that opens deep and luminous, permeated with a serene and placid atmosphere, beyond the arches built with vigor and elegance.
There is in the colors, in the composition, in the figures, in the landscape, an equilibrium that P. will no longer be able to achieve, however much in the works that follow up to 1500 (Virgin with Child in the Pinacoteca of Bologna; triptych for the Certosa of Pavia, now in London; Assumption of the Uffizi; the altarpiece, dismembered, for S. Pietro in Perugia) he still shows himself fully master of his means. But already in what should have been the masterpiece of his maturity, the decoration of the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia, there begins, with the repetition of old schemes, a repetition that will become ever more tired and superficial, the decline of the painter: he will continue to work until the end of his life according to the now outdated manners of Quattrocento painting. Testimony to this are also the best among the last paintings: an Adoration of the Magi at Città della Pieve, a St. Sebastian at Panicale, a Crucifixion at Siena, an Adoration of the Shepherds at Montefalco and finally the frescoes of Fontignano, the Virgin with Child and the Adoration of the Magi interrupted at his death (1523).
Numerous other works are variously attributed to him. His pleasant, elegant and serene manner won him a large following of disciples who, with the exception of Raphael, generally remained inferior to the master. To him, a great artist especially in the period of his first maturity, goes the merit of having favored the renewal of Umbrian art, nourishing its specific characteristics with the most recent discoveries of the Florentine Renaissance. - See pl. LXXXII.
Bibliography5 works
Maria Donati