The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (367 page)

(
c.
1445/50–1523).
Italian painter, active mainly in Perugia, from which his nickname derives. His early career is obscure, but he seems to have formed his style chiefly in Florence, where
Vasari
says he studied with
Verrocchio
—this would have been at about the same time that
Leonardo
da Vinci was training with him (another tradition has it that Perugino was a pupil of
Piero della Francesca
; this could have preceded his training in Florence). In 1472 he was enrolled as a painter in the fraternity of St Luke in Florence (the same year as Leonardo) and in 1475 he was back in Perugia. By 1481 he was sufficiently well known to be commissioned to paint frescos on the walls of the newly built Sistine Chapel, Rome, along with
Botticelli
, Domenico
Ghirlandaio
, and Cosimo
Rosselli
(
Signorelli
later completed the work). Vasari says that Botticelli was head of the team, but some modern scholars think that Perugino was more likely to have been leader, partly because of the prominence of his contributions. His main work there is
Christ Delivering the Keys to St Peter
; he also did the frescoed altarpiece, but this was destroyed to make way for
Michelangelo's
Last Judgement
. His reputation firmly established, he travelled extensively in central Italy, and in the 1490s he maintained a workshop in Florence as well as in Perugia. In 1500, when he was decorating the Audience Chamber of the Collegio del Cambio at Perugia, he was called by Agostino Chigi , the wealthy Sienese banker and patron, the best painter in Italy, and he was indeed at his peak at about this time. Perugino was a fine portraitist as well as a fresco painter, but today he is best known for his altarpieces, which are usually gentle, pious, and rather sentimental in manner. His style does not seem to have been a reflection of his personality, for Vasari says he ‘was not a religious man’ and that he ‘would have gone to any lengths for money’. In about 1505 he left the competitive atmosphere of Florence, where his work now seemed old-fashioned, and settled permanently in Perugia; his later work is often routine and repetitive. At his best, however, as in the Vatican fresco, he has the authority of a great master. The harmony and spatial clarity of his compositions and his idealized physical types had great influence on the young
Raphael
, who worked with him early in his career, so Perugino can be seen as one of the harbingers of the High
Renaissance
. A second wave of his influence came in the 19th cent., when he was glorified by the
Pre-Raphaelites
.

 
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(1481–1536).
Sienese architect, painter, and stage designer, active mainly in Rome, where he settled in 1503. He worked under
Bramante
on St Peter's, and eventually became architect to the building after
Raphael's
death in 1520. Amongst High
Renaissance
architects he ranks almost alongside these two great contemporaries, but his style was very different—sophisticated and delicate rather than monumental and grave. In spite of his genius he had little material success, according to
Vasari
because of his ‘retiring nature’. His greatest work—indeed the greatest secular building of the High Renaissance—is the Villa Farnesina (1508–11) in Rome, built for the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. The Farnesina contains decorations by Raphael,
Sebastiano del Piombo
and
Sodoma
, as well as Peruzzi's own masterpiece in painting—the Sala delle Prospettive, a brilliant piece of feigned architectural painting that confirms early accounts of his skill in perspective and stage-design.

 
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(1741/2–1814).
English painter of portraits,
genre
and historical scenes, and
fancy pictures
. He studied with
Hudson
in the late 1750s and travelled to Italy and France in 1772–6 and again to Paris in 1783. Foreign influence is clearly seen in the richness of his technique (admirers called him ‘the English
Titian
’) and in the pin-up type of picture of pretty women—distinctly reminiscent of
Greuze
—with which he caused mild scandal and attained great popularity in engravings. He took Holy Orders in 1782 and retired from professional practice in 1788, but continued to paint for his own pleasure. His later works include some mawkish religious paintings and some dull pictures for
Boydell's
Shakespeare Gallery.

 
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(1854–1907).
American still-life painter. With his friend
Harnett
he is now considered the outstanding American still-life painter of his period, but he was little known during his lifetime and after his death was completely forgotten until rediscovered in 1947 by the critic Alfred Frankenstein . His style was strongly influenced by Harnett (whose signature has sometimes been fraudulently added to paintings by Peto ), but his work was softer and more anecdotal, often depicting discarded objects. Peto worked in his native Philadelphia, then from 1889 in seclusion at Island Heights, New Jersey.

 
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(1886–1962). Russian-born sculptor and painter who became a French citizen in 1930
. He was the elder brother of Naum
Gabo
and like him one of the pioneers and chief exponents of
Constructivism
. Between 1911 and 1914 he made lengthy visits to Paris, where he associated with
Archipenko
and
Modigliani
. After two years in Norway with Gabo he returned to Russia in 1917, and in that year became professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Moscow, where
Kandinsky
and
Malevich
also taught. In 1920 he was co-signatory of Gabo's
Realistic Manifesto
, which set forth the ideals of Constructivism, and in 1922 he helped to organize a major exhibition of Soviet art in Berlin. He moved back to Paris in 1923 because of official disapproval of abstract art and lived there for the rest of his life. Up to this time he had been a painter, but he now turned to sculpture, at first working mainly in plastic, then in welded metal. Initially his sculptures retained vestiges of representation, as in his witty
Portrait of Marcel Duchamp
(Yale University Art Gallery, 1926), but by 1927 he had arrived at pure abstraction. His later work was characterized by bold spiralling forms (
Dynamic Projection in the 30th Degree
, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1950–1). Pevsner was a founder member of
Abstraction-Création
and was influential in transmitting Constructivist ideas to other artists in the group.