Archeomatica_3_2023

ENTERPRISES
ten paintings, which were included
in the initiative, can be
viewed online here: https://bit.
ly/3Pimqwv and observed in the
most minute details without losing
clarity and maintaining the
perception of the relationships
of size, proportion and distance.
From the digital recording,
which exposes them online from
any condition of permanent public
placement or storage, under
the authorial keyword of
Pietro Perugino, it is the works
that appear with maximum clarity,
in focus just as if we were
in front of them with a precision
optical instrumentation. From
the images, made dynamic up to
maximum magnification, emerges
a painter with a style that is
both grandiose and meticulous,
among the first to make use of
the Pierfrancescan perspective,
as supported by Federico Zeri in
the Bollettino d'arte in 1953, in
the article Il Maestro dell 'Annunciazione
Gardner. Some works
recognized by Zeri previously
attributed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo
were displayed in the exhibition.
A perspective which in the
Adorazione dei Magi di Perugia
(fig.1) reaches the heights of the
master from Borgo Sansepolcro
in the most intense chromaticism
of Domenico Veneziano.
I first learned both through the
subtleties and glimpses of the
city walls of Benedetto Bonfigli,
whom Leone Pascoli had first
advanced in the role of his first
master in Perugia and through
whom he must have become acquainted
with their works, the
first painters to flagrantly influence
him.
In this plate the characters wear
velvet doublets buttoned on the
collar and in the first on the left,
with the red cap (fig. 2), a threequarter
self-portrait is recognisable,
based on the comparison
with the frontal self-portrait
of the Collegio del Cambio in
Audience Hall. The Cambio frescoes,
which argue for Divine
Wisdom, are the chronological
threshold of the painter's triumph
in Perugia, once the idea of
Fig. 2 - Pietro Perugino, Adorazione dei Magi, panel, detail of the self-portrait (National
Gallery of Umbria, Perugia; Image Bank Haltadefinizione)
a total collaboration of aids, including
Raffaello, had been set
aside for them: a collaboration,
now understood only as partial,
which was postulated by Giovan
Battista Cavalcaselle, who, following
Vasari and reading the
date inscribed in the right bay of
the frescoes (MD), dated them
to 1500. Recently, the discovery
of the contract drawn up in
1496 (Sartore 2013) has allowed
to draw up the chronology for
the years 1498-1500, with the
hypothesis of an intervention by
Pinturicchio as well as Raffaello.
A third self-portrait appeared in
La consegna delle chiavi of the
Sistine Chapel (fig. 3): it is the
man in the dark habit behind
the Apostles of the group on the
right behind St. Peter (A. Venturi
1950, fig.3). Perugino certainly
did not lack, more than Raffaello
himself, the skills of a portraitist,
also based on the recognition,
always in the same panel of
the Adoration of the Magi (figs. 1
and 2), of the portrait of Andrea
Verrocchio, in whose workshop
the young painter had just completed
his Florentine apprenticeship,
around 1475, in the fifth
face with the gray cap in the line
of adoring the Child. Date from
which the tight chronology of
the artist's intense independent
activity in central Italy unfolds
with commissions in Rome and
Venice and from Mantua (Gnoli
1923). The grandiose panel of
the L’adorazione dei Magi comes
from the Umbrian gallery from
the church of S. Maria Nuova
and, in the first half of the sixteenth
century, from the demolished
one of S. Maria dei Servi in
36 36 ArcheomaticA ArcheomaticA N°3 2023 N°3 2023