A Good Look

Article reviewer, Dr. Azar Rejaie

Azar Rejaie is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the University of Houston-Downtown’s Arts and Humanities Department. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history in 2006 where she completed a dissertation that focused on embedded self-portraits of Renaissance painters. She is currently at work on an article dealing with Perugino and his self-portraits

Pietro Perugino in the Collegio del Cambio

Although today the little Umbrian hill-town of Perugia is probably better known for its international chocolate festival than for Il Perugino, this isn’t Perugino’s fault. The artist also known as Pietro Vannucci, a teacher of Raphael, was named by a contemporary art collector as the “best master (painter) in Italy.” In fact, one could argue that by painting around the year 1500 the first known autonomous, self-identified self-portrait of an Italian Renaissance artist, Perugino was ahead of the curve promotionally speaking. That this frescoed self-image is included as if it were an autonomous panel “hung” on the wall of a chamber decorated with a cycle of some of Greco-Roman history’s most important military figures and thinkers within the palazzo that served Perugia as its medieval town hall shows just how far artists had come in the world. Although formerly thought of as only skilled “craftsmen,” by the dawn of the 16th century artists were beginning to become something more in the eyes of their contemporaries.

This fresco cycle provides scholars with a rich source of knowledge regarding Perugino’s mature work and his workshop practices, and represents well the artist’s poetic, lyrical style. The self-portrait of the painter in its midst appears unflinchingly realistic in marked contrast with the idealized, dreamy faces of the philosophers, generals, prophets, sibyls and personifications of virtues that adorn the walls around him. The artist’s small, watchful eyes set in the fleshy, unsmiling face appear to assure the doubting viewer of the truth of what the “hung” plaque below him asserts in elegant Latin: “Pietro Perugino, celebrated painter. If the art of painting became lost, he would restore it. If it had never been invented, he alone could bring it to this point.” High praise, to be sure. Nevertheless, as the only portrait of a living individual in the space, Perugino’s self-portrait in the midst of the painted cycle functioned as all of the images did to provide the Perugian officials who met in the chamber with a model of faultless behavior as they went about their official business. The direct realism of the self-portrait in conjunction with the lofty epigram seems to affirm – as the romanticized faces of the long-dead philosophers and generals might not – that worthy behavior and perhaps even fame can be attained by us all.

Images of the Collegio del Cambio cycle and of Perugino’s self-portrait there can be found at the following websites:

http://www.perugiaonline.com/umbria_perugia_collegiodelcambio.html
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/perugino/cambio/index.html