Works by Pietro Perugino
35 works · 123 msPietro Perugino, the Umbrian painter who taught Raphael, set saints such as Sebastian and the mourners at the Cross before wide views of hills, slender feathery trees and blue distance.
His name marks him as a man of Perugia, though his birthplace was Città della Pieve. Vasari says he trained in Florence under Andrea del Verrocchio, alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo di Credi, and Piero della Francesca may have shown him perspective. He was among the first in central Italy to paint in oil. Around 1480 Pope Sixtus IV called him to Rome to fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel.
His Portrait of Lorenzo di Credi, dated 1488, sets the sitter's black cap and robe against rocky hills that fade to blue. In the Louvre's Saint Sebastian, one of several versions, the saint stands at a column under an arch with two arrows in his body and his eyes turned up. The Marriage of the Virgin now in Caen, with its domed, many-sided temple on a wide square, was to a great extent the model for Raphael's Sposalizio of 1504.
Almost everything below is religious, mostly painted in the 1490s and 1500s, and a few are drawings. For Isabella d'Este's studiolo he made the Combat of Love and Chastity in 1503, where small figures and winged cupids fight across a meadow. Michelangelo once called him a bungler to his face, and his Annunziata altarpiece for Florence was faulted for lack of new ideas, after which his pupils left him. He died of plague at Fontignano in 1523 and was buried in a field, the spot now lost.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Louvre, National Gallery of Art, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, Nationalmuseum.
![The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Saint Jerome, and Saint Mary Magdalene [middle panel]](https://konstfynd.b-cdn.net/artworks/nga-30/w400.webp)
