PERUZZI, BALDASSARRE. - Architect and painter, b. in Siena on 6 March 1481, d. in Rome on 6 Jan. 1536. At the age of 20, in Siena, he collaborated with Pinturicchio on the decoration of the chapel of St. John in the Cathedral, but two years later he was already in Rome, the field of his greatest undertakings.
In 1509, after having carried on activity as a painter, according to some scholars also in the apse of the church of St. Onofrio, but certainly in a Nativity in the church of St. Rocco, he began in Rome the construction of the Palazzo of Agostino Chigi, later called the Farnesina, and there he left, in the loggia, in a ground-floor room, and in the main hall on the first floor, also notable examples of his painting. In 1516 he adorned with paintings the Ponzetti Chapel in St. Mary della Pace, then in 1520 he was appointed architect of the Fabbrica of St. Peter, an appointment that was confirmed to him in 1530 after he had taken refuge in Siena, following the sack of Rome in 1527, during which he had been captured and held for ransom, and had been received with great honor by that Republic. And to Rome, after a five-year stay in Siena, where he worked above all as a military architect and painter (panel in the church of Fontegiusta, with Augustus and the Sibyl, and frescoes in the Castle of Belcaro), he returned, to direct the works of the Fabbrica of St. Peter and to build, between the close of 1532 and 1536, what is his masterpiece: the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne.
A painter initially bound to the manners of Pinturicchio and Perugino, but soon inclined in Rome toward Raphaelesque forms and then toward Lombard-inflected accents, such as he was able to know through Sodoma, who arrived in Rome precisely in 1515, P. links his greater fame to his activity as an architect. Having first oriented himself in the footsteps of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, during his Roman stay he was drawn into the cultural orbit of Raphael and, like the Urbinate, he knew how to understand and reduce to his own accents the forms of ancient art with freedom and spontaneous grace. Such he appears in the Palazzo della Farnesina, which Vasari says was «conducted with that grace which is seen, not built but truly born», in the completion of Raphael's dome of St. Eligio degli Orefici and in other minor works attributed to him. But in the Palazzo dei Massimo the still timid grace of those buildings yields to a new and luxuriant sense of Renaissance forms. Here in a small space, in the curved facade, in the deep ground-floor portico, in the entrance hall, in the courtyards, the fine linearism of P.'s early constructions gives way before a new chiaroscuro taste. This is realized in the strong contrast of shadows and lights, in the free perspectival and scenographic play, in the ostentatious heaviness of certain elements drawn from antiquity, placed beside others still nourished by subtle fifteenth-century elegance of Siena. From this springs a varied work, new, rich in pictorial motifs, to be considered among the most choice of our Renaissance.
Bibliography2 works
Emilio Lavagnino