Pietro Perugino was an Italian Renaissance painter, born Pietro Vannucci in Città della Pieve, Umbria, around 1450, who died in 1523. Pope Sixtus IV had him paint a wall of the Sistine Chapel in 1481 and 1482, and around 1500 a banker called him the best master in Italy. Today he is remembered as the man who taught Raphael.
A banker praised him in a letter, his own assistant outshone him within a few years, and Michelangelo called him a bungler in public.
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The banker was Agostino Chigi, and his letter is dated 7 November 1500. By then Perugino had painted for the pope in Rome, had signed a contract to decorate the hall of the money changers of Perugia, and was sending altarpieces to Mantua, Naples, Orvieto and Siena. He kept a workshop in Florence and another in Perugia.
Almost everything in that sentence was undone later. A young painter who had worked in his workshop painted the same wedding scene as his master, and the pupil's version is the one everyone remembers. Michelangelo said in public that Perugino's art was clumsy. And the wall Perugino had painted behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel no longer exists.
What You'll Discover
Who really taught him.
What he painted before Michelangelo.
What a banker saw in him.
What his best pupil took.
What Michelangelo said to his face.
Where his grave went missing.