Landscape (recto); Landscape (verso)

Perugino (Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Discovered by George Goldner at auction in 1992, this view of wooded hills descending toward a river is an extremely rare example of a landscape drawing by the artist, and is drawn in a delicate chiaroscuro technique with brown ink and white on a dark ground, full of atmospheric effects. A very similar motif appears in the background of Perugino's Vision of Saint Bernard (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), an altarpiece painted about 1489 for the Nasi Chapel in the Cistercian church of Santa Maria Maddalena di Cestello, known now as Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, near Florence. The teacher of Raphael (whom he outlived) and one of the painters in highest demand by patrons throughout Italy in the late fifteenth century, Perugino produced major works in Rome, Perugia, Bologna, Cremona, and Florence, as well as in the smaller towns of his native regions of Umbria and the Marches. He is best known for his graceful figural compositions set within monumental architectural backdrops and landscapes which create the exquisitely serene, idyllic mood that his patrons no doubt admired. (Carmen C. Bambach, 2008, revised 2014)

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.