Pietro Vannucci (≈1448-1523), called 'Perugino' (from Perugia), was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He was considered the most important master of the Umbrian School and was Raphael's teacher. His own teachers were probably Piero della Francesca and Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose workshop Leonardo da Vinci, among others, was trained. In 1481, he painted his most famous painting, Christ Handing the Keys to Peter, one of the works from the wall fresco cycle in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, in which the most celebrated painters in Italy at the time collaborated. The perspective depth stretching particularly impressed the people of the time. A detail of another of Perugino's frescoes to the right of the altar in the Sistine Chapel, the "Baptism of Christ" painted in 1482, is depicted on the left of the commemorative coin: John the Baptist baptising Christ in and with the waters of the Jordan, beneath the hovering dove of the Holy Spirit. On the right foreground, the coin designer ''Daniela Fusco'' has placed a self-portrait of Perugino, which he painted between 1497 and 1500 as a fresco in the 'Collegio del Cambio' of the Palazzo dei Priori (Prior's Palace) in Perugia. |
