Edgar Degas: "People call me the painter of dancing girls.."

• "Do it again, ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seem to be an accident, not even movement".

• "Bisogna rifare dieci volte, cento volte lo stesso soggetto. Niente, in arte, deve sembrare dovuto al caso".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: "I grandi uomini sono modesti”!

• "Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable".

• "Vuoi sapere quali sono le due qualità di un'opera d'arte? In primo luogo, deve essere indescrivibile e, in secondo luogo, deve essere inimitabile".

• "I grandi uomini sono modesti".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pietro Perugino (1450-1523) | Raphael's master

Perugino🎨, byname of Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, Italian Renaissance painter🎨 of the Umbria school and the teacher of Raphael🎨.

His work (e.g., Giving of the Keys to St. Peter🎨, 1481-82, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome) anticipated High Renaissance ideals in its compositional clarity, sense of spaciousness, and economy of formal elements.

Perugino | The Sistine Chapel frescoes

The wall paintings of the Sistine Chapel🎨 are among the most important examples of the type of painting developed in Florence in the later fifteenth century.

The five artists brought to Rome to execute them came from various different art centres: Botticelli🎨, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli from Florence, Perugino from Umbria🎨, Signorelli from Cortona.

Perugino | Early Renaissance painter

Pietro Perugino (1450-1523), was born Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci.

Contemporaries regarded Perugino as one of the leading painters in Florence in the 1480s and as the "best master in Italy" in 1500, but soon afterward his reputation suffered a decline from which it has only partly recovered.

The grounds for this criticism, then as now, is the formulaic quality of his work, in particular his tendency to repeat figure types or even whole compositions again and again.