Out of the Shadow of Giants

The late 15th and early 16th century Italian painter Pietro Perugino is most widely known for being the almost exact contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, the principal teacher of Raphael and the artist whose fresco on the altar wall of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel was destroyed to make way for Michelangelo’s devastating visual essay on life’s torment, “The Last Judgment.” Has ever a gifted artist been so deeply engulfed by the imposing shadows cast by even more generously gifted contemporaries?

In company like that, it ain’t easy to get noticed. But, then again, it’s hard to take your eyes off a picture like “Sepulcrum Christi” (1498), Perugino’s moving evocation of the mysterious divide between human mortality and indestructible divinity central to Christian doctrine, and a painting that dates to the most powerful period of his long and fruitful career. In this devotional Pieta, painted on a 3-foot-tall wood panel in colored glazes of light-filled oils emerging from darkness, a silently weeping Nicodemus lifts the right forearm of the dead Christ to display for your inspection its gravely wounded hand. Christ’s left hand rests heavily on his thigh, its own awful piercing subtle but visible, adjacent to the prayerfully entwined fingers of Joseph of Arimathaea, whose tomb has been prepared to receive the corpse. Perugino gives you enough startling visual cues to be able to feel the body’s dead physical weight, which he matches ounce for ounce with spiritual gravity, conveyed through exquisite idealization.

Perugino (circa 1450-1523) is the sort of once-successful painter every admirer of the Renaissance knows at least something about, even though few would claim intimate acquaintance with his long, diversified but uneven career. Which, ironically enough, may have helped to launch an unexpected exhibition of Perugino’s work (including the dazzling “Sepulcrum Christi”) in this small city in Western Michigan.

“Pietro Perugino: Master of the Italian Renaissance” is a small gem of a show newly opened at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, a hitherto unremarkable institution housed in a handsome old post office building in the city center. The attractively mounted presentation features 18 paintings and five drawings by Perugino, five paintings and seven drawings by students or followers of the master and one anonymously executed majolica plate. The earthenware plate’s tin-glazed depiction of the Madonna and Child recalls in composition, pose and facial and drapery features the same figures in Perugino’s monumental “Madonna della Giustizia” hanging nearby, thus handily demonstrating how the painter’s most admired work also found its way into the popular culture of its day.

There has never before been a Perugino exhibition in the United States. No monograph about him exists in English. Half a century has passed since the last show, which was mounted in Italy. Add the rarity of museum exhibitions of any kind that require loans of 500-year-old pictures painted on fragile wood panels, and “Pietro Perugino” assumes an unusual significance.

Why Grand Rapids? It’s not a city on the usual list of places that might manage such a coup, like L.A. or New York, Boston or Chicago. Yet a fortuitous combination of luck and aspiration conspired to bring about the show, which will not travel after it closes here Feb. 1.

Joseph Becherer, an enterprising young curator who is also on the faculty of a local community college, is a Perugino scholar. Perugia, the town in Umbria where Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci was born--and from which he got the nickname, Il Perugino--is an official “sister city” of Grand Rapids. Peter Secchia, U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1989 to 1993, is a local corporate head. During a 1992 visit to Italy by a delegation of Grand Rapidians, the seed for the show was planted as part of a larger plan for international trade and tourism. It took deep root when the Umbrian National Gallery agreed to an unprecedented loan of nine panels to the show--panels that had never left Italy before--and the flowering came when such heavy-hitter American museums as the Detroit Institute of Arts, Metropolitan Museum in New York, Washington’s National Gallery and others then agreed to participate, making loans of crucial paintings and drawings.

One surprising feature of the show is that, despite its modest size (this is no full-scale retrospective, although the excellent catalog is extensive), Becherer has covered a considerable amount of ground. In its economy of means it’s a model of small-exhibition design. You get a concise overview of the artist’s career, suggested areas of difficulty in Perugino scholarship, an idea of his broad influence and a curiosity for further looking. Plus, a bonus: Four famous altarpiece panels chronicling the life of Christ, long in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, have finally been reunited with the missing fifth panel, separated more than a century ago and now owned by the Met.

The show begins with a rare early canvas, dated around 1470. Despite some crudity and awkwardness of technique, many of the hallmarks of Perugino’s mature style are already coming together in this youthful effort. Made to be used as a processional banner, and thus in somewhat abraded condition, the “Pieta With Saints Jerome and Mary Magdalene” is rigorous in the symmetry of its composition and adventurous in placing its figures in an expansive natural landscape, which unfolds in rationally articulated spatial layers behind them.

Once Perugino figured out this particular motif, he employed it in a variety of often refined ways for the next 50 years. When he used it a decade later for a fresco in the Vatican--”Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter,” the most famous and influential work of his career--the compositional structure became a standard for Renaissance painting.

The effect is an odd amalgam of rational order, which is given depth by the painter’s knowing stylistic references to the art of Classical antiquity (he parades his art-smarts), and frankly mysterious eccentricity. Take a small oil of “The Annunciation” (1507); it is as visually coherent as a staged theatrical drama, with paired characters arrayed on an outdoor patio in symmetrically balanced blocks of space, in order to tell with clarity the simple biblical story of Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that, despite her careful chastity, she would soon be giving birth to the son of God. But look at the weird space smack in the center, between the kneeling angel and the understandably startled Mary, who turns away with arms upraised in utter disbelief, all the while maintaining a perfectly sinuous contrapposto pose.

The gap between them, where the miraculous news is spoken, is marked by Perugino with a gap in the patio wall. This visual opening draws your eye back, into the light-filled natural landscape beyond and up into a soft cerulean sky, framed by a pair of trees. They’re the only trees for miles around. Perugino echoes the unknowable foreground figures and their miracle with suddenly mysterious natural elements, which frame evanescent space in the world at large.

The exhibition includes a variety of drawings by followers, students or assistants in Perugino’s prolific workshop in Florence, which suggests the breadth of his influence. One Perugino drawing is a double-sided sheet that shows a quickly sketched and then more finely detailed landscape; it’s very rare (only one other 15th century landscape sketch is known, that by Leonardo), which implies the novelty and inventiveness of his work. The several paintings by followers or students demonstrate the multifaceted impact he had on other artists.

The show’s heart lies in the nine paintings and one drawing made in the dozen years or so after 1492, when Perugino was working in top form. What makes most of these so moving is their emphatic recognition of you, the viewer standing before them. Perugino’s best pictures exude a confident sense of display. When you look at one of these you’re not eavesdropping on a private scene. Instead, whether it’s dramatic, as in Nicodemus proffering Christ’s wound for your close inspection, or more subtle, as in a Madonna who sits enrobed in a heavenly blue cloak, a chubby Christ child on her knee, as if posing for the pleasure of your awe-struck contemplation, Perugino is actively soliciting an empathetic response.

He gets it too.

Michelangelo, coming down a bit harshly, dismissed Perugino as a goffo nell’arte--loosely, an artistic clodhopper. Perhaps he had in mind the Umbrian’s work of the 1510s and ‘20s, which, from the five examples here, has settled into a kind of formulaic routine that suggests dutiful studio-production.

But, remember: Michelangelo was some 30 years Perugino’s junior. He was the aggressive representative of a new generation--one that codified the radical idea of the artist as an intellectual. That rambunctious concept, which shook off once and for all the old medieval notion of the artist as principally a craftsman, hired to execute a prescribed set of established ideas, had certain of its roots in Perugino’s own art, which was inventive in portraying Christian doctrine. In the end, though, it couldn’t represent a more different temperament from the sweet serenity of the older artist’s work.

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“Pietro Perugino: Master of the Italian Renaissance,” Grand Rapids Art Museum, 155 N. Division Ave., Grand Rapids, Mich. Through Feb. 1. Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, to 9 p.m. (616) 459-5616.