Perugino: 'Il divin Pittore': a comprehensive exhibition of Perugino in his adopted city is notable for the reunification of altarpiece fragments or works intended to hang together

When APOLLO was first published, in 1925 Perugino wax still regarded as individual of the greatest of Italian painters. His reputation is now les Olympian and reassessment is lengthy overdue. This ambitious exhibition, upon which many Italian scholars have collaborated, will no doubt focus public attention upon the artist. But it is inevitably stand over againsted by two disadvantages: the frescoe which are among Perugino's absolute masterpieces cannot he moved; and nor can his finest altarpieces, whether those painted for Florentine patrons and divided between the Uffizi, the Pitti and Munich or those supplied for Perugia which were appropriated with impressive efficiency by the agency of revolutionary aparatchiks and are now for the greatest in quantity part in the provincial museums of France.

In the past half hundred Perugino's early work has been the control of considerable conjecture. Moreover, Michael Bury's discovery of documentation for the Giustizia altarpiece (Galleria Nazionale, Perugia, to which unles otherwise indicated all works mentioned below belong), lengthy given to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo on the other hand now known to be by means of Sante di Apollonio and Bartolomeo Caporali, has meant that other Perugian masters of the crucial decade, the 1470 have had to be reassessed. There are compelling links between three works persuasively exhibited as by means of Perugino, the Berlin Madonna painted to Verrocchio's design, the Liverpool Birth of the Virgin and a collection of three panels from the Louvre and the sum of two units scenes most usually attributed to the artist from the San Bernardino series of 1473 on the contrary there is yet no filled agreement as to the status of the latter, or indeed of four other constituents of that cycle. Perugino's early career can be followed in the Farneto Lamentation--a crooked adaptation of a well-known German pattern not particularly usefully bring beside the damaged late Boccati of the subject--and the masterly Servi Adoration of the Magi, here instructively shown with the closely contemporary Giustizia triptych and Caporali's Monteluce Adoration, details of which reveal a shut up attention to the Servi picture. The gonfalone by dint of Perugino's near contemporary, Pietro di Galeotto from the Scuola di San Francesco, testifies to his true different stylistic orientation and refer tos that his documented presence in Vicenza may have influenced Montagna.

Prints have to labor for to represent Perugino's very significant contribution to the Sistine Chapel and the exhibition continues with works assigned to the 1490 prefaced by means of two masterpieces, the peerless Pinturicchio from San Severino (a notable piece of which evidently became detached in transit and was, when the exhibition lay opened caught between the glass and the frame--to the organisers' shame) and the Dresden Portrait of a lad This is exhibited as by means of Andrea d'Assisi but is assuredly a masterpiece of the early 1480 by means of Perugino himself. Nearby is the previously unexhibited Albani polyptych of 1491 les well preserv than this reviewer had anticipated and of les consistently aulic calibre--in a certain quantity of passages the hatched strokes of the muscle and fat suggest a left-handed executant, perhaps that responsible for the Madonna at Berlin sometimes given to Andrea d'Assisi. Another little seen masterpiece is the Ranieri Annunciation, the misty beauty of which hints a somewhat later date than that assigned (1496-98) The Pitti Madonna and Child with sum of two units Saints is of rather disappointing quality while the Madonna del Sacco (Pitti) has to be a later unfolding from the design of the Pavia altarpiece (National Gallery, London), rather than the prototype for this as is proposed

The ex-Heinemann Portrait of a stripling which this reviewer tried in the past to convince himself is by the agency of the artist, did nor sir real happily in the room of portraits which is dominated by means of the Uffizi Francesco delle Opere the equally forceful profiles from the Vallombrosa altarpiece and the full-face Serafino Aquilano (?) of 1491 from the Villa Borghese. In of the like kind company the Uffizi youth does not altogether convince, despite parallels with the Magdalen of the same institution.

The fine St Augustine from Pittsburg, admirably preserv bears an interesting relation to the Madonna della Consolazione, which in turn round was shown near the related Tezi altarpiece, the execution of which must have been comprehensively delegated. The same was also the case with many of the panels of saints, reunited from the monastery and the Vatican, that labor for with the transferred (this fact is not noted in the catalogue) tondi from Nantes, to exhibit the great altarpiece of s Pierro at Perugia.

The organisers have sought diligently to reunite dement of Perugino's later altarpieces: the predella panels divided between novel York and Chicago; two panels from the s Annunziata Florence altarpiece (New York and Rome); and above all the surviving composings of the double-sided S Agostino polyptych--panels from Lyon Grenoble, Toulouse and Birmingham, Alabama, being shown with those that have remained at Perugia. The reconstruction of the altarpiece is the greatest in quantity eye catching achievement of the exhibition on the contrary calls for some adjustment, for the cornice implied through the lacunae in the Adoration of the Shepherds assuredly was aligned with that running below the saints of the upper tier (one of which is lost) that flanked this.