Home	Perugino: The Life of Pietro Perugino, Painter [c.1450-1523]
	PERUGINO (c. 1445/46-1523), whose real name was Pietro Vannucci, was called after the town of Perugia in which he settled after having worked in Florence and Rome. In Rome, he collaborated on the painting of the Sistine Chapel. His ideal of calm beauty is expressed in his frescoes and paintings with their clean construction and spacious landscapes. As the teacher of Raphael, he was greatly admired by the Nazarenes and PreRaphaelites. In Europe, landscape painting has been much more closely associated with particular localities, rendered with varying degrees of realism. The desire of the Renaissance painters to recreate actual appearances inevitably led to a realistic rendering of the background behind figures of Saints and Madonnas. The backgrounds in the large figure compositions of such painters as Pollaiuolo and Francesca are astonishingly faithful renderings of the Tuscan landscape. The study of perspective developed an understanding of the importance of space and light in the painting of landscape and these qualities are emphasised in the works of Perugino and his followers. A more personal attitude towards Nature, the beginnings of an understanding of the power of landscape to convey particular emotions, is displayed in the remarkable backgrounds of Giovanni Bellini, and to some extent in those of van Eyck. The Venetian painters, of whom Bellini was the first, did much to further the development of landscape painting. In pictures such as Titian's 'Noli me Tangere' and still more Giorgione's 'Fête Champêtre' and 'The Tempest', landscape is no longer relegated to the background, but plays an equal part with the figures in the production of the total impression.