Perugino

   Nickname for Pietro Vannucci (ca. 1450-1523), an Um-brian painter who began his training with the conservative school of painters active in Perugia but was early subjected to Florentine influ-ence by an apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio; he also studied with Piero della Francesca. He is especially admired for the high quality of his drawings. By 1472 Perugino had become a member of the Company of Saint Luke, a confraternity of painters at Florence, but that same year he moved back to Perugia. Of his early works, Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter (1482), painted in the Sistine Chapel at Rome for Pope Sixtus IV, is the best known. Perugino also worked at Florence, where he painted Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1495) in the Pitti Palace, and one of his most admired works was a series of frescoes in the Collegio del Cambio at Perugia (1496-1500). He seems to have passed out of fashion late in his ca-reer; his Combat Between Love and Chastity (1505) displeased Is-abella d'Este, the patron who commissioned it, and the plan to paint a ceiling in the Vatican apartments of Pope Julius II fell through be-cause the pope had become more interested in Perugino's most fa-mous pupil, Raphael.