Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

About the Painting

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Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

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Regarded by many of his contemporaries as the leading painter associated with the revival of Italian art at the end of the fifteenth century, Pietro Perugino was widely praised for introducing a style of painting characterized by a unique mastery of perspective, light, and color. As Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) later noted, his pictures were “so pleasing that they filled not only Florence and Italy, but also France, Spain, and other countries”. By the early 1490s, Perugino had the most active studio in Florence, which produced major altarpieces, stained-glass windows, frescoes, and other works. The large scale and subject of Virgin and Child with Saints indicate that it was undoubtedly commissioned as an altarpiece, although its original location remains unknown.

The composition of this devotional painting is a type known as a sacra conversazione, or holy gathering, showing the Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and James on the left and Saint Francis and an unidentified local saint on the right. Earlier images of this type took the form of polyptychs (multipaneled paintings) comprised of a central panel that featured the Virgin and Child with separate, framed panels attached on either side bearing images of saints. During the fourteenth century, artists sometimes eliminated the separate panels, and by the fifteenth century it was common for all of the figures to be grouped within a single, unified space, as they are shown here. The square format, architectural setting, and symmetrical configuration recall several other works painted by Perugino in the late 1490s and early 1500s.

T. Barton Thurber