Galleria Nazionale
Palazzo dei Priori
About
One of central Italy's top museums, Perugia's National Gallery houses the largest and finest collection of Umbrian art in the world, including plenty of Perugino paintings. The gallery begins on the second floor, but on your way upstairs pause at the first floor to peek into the glass window in the door of the Sala del Consiglio Comunale. You'll see the original bronze griffin and lion from the palazzo's old entrance on Piazza IV Novembre. Recent studies suggest the griffin may actually be an ancient Etruscan sculpture, to which new wings were added when the lion was cast in 1281. Room 1 currently houses 16th- to 18th-century works, including Caravaggiesque paintings by the likes of Orazio Gentilleschi and Valentin de Boulogne, as well as a baroque Nativity of the Virgin (1643) by Pietro da Cortona. Rooms 2 and 3 show the development of 13th-century Perugian painting. It was heavily influenced by the artists working on Assisi's Basilica di San Francesco and therefore torn between the local traditional eastern influences and the classicism of the new Florentine masters, Cimabue and Giotto. The artist called the Maestro del Trittico di Perugia represents the former styling, though he did indulge in a highly creative take on Byzantine motifs in the Madonna and Child on the shutters of the tabernacle here. The Maestro di San Francesco and especially the Maestro di Farneto are much more firmly rooted in the Giottesque school of late medieval art that was beginning to form into the Renaissance. Room 4 is full of 14th-century painting and sculpture, with the Sienese influence represented by works from the early master Duccio di Boninsegna -- a 1304 Madonna and Child featuring six tiny angels and a similar 1330s scene by his follower Meo di Guido da Siena. On the left wall is a tiny parchment painting of the Madonna and Child with the Crucifixion by Puccio Capanna, one of the most modern and skilled of Giotto's followers. On the far wall is the museum's greatest masterpiece, Piero della Francesca's Polyptych of Sant'Antonio. The master from Sansepolcro probably painted this large altarpiece in the mid-1460s, with a Madonna enthroned in a classical niche surrounded by solid-bodied saints. The most arresting portion, though, is the pinnacle's Annunciation scene, worked with a delicacy and sense of perspective unheard of at the time. The scene is all the more engrossing for the illusory hole punched straight through the center of it by a receding arched colonnade that puts a gulf between the angel Gabriel and Mary. Rooms 5 to 8 are devoted to early-15th-century altarpieces from the brushes of Taddeo di Bartolo, Bartolo di Fredi, Ottaviano Nelli, Lucca di Tommè, Giovanni Boccati, and Bicci di Lorenzo. Among them, in room 6, is Gentile da Fabriano's tiny gemlike Madonna and Child (1405), an International Gothic masterpiece. Gentile used layers of transparent paints, plenty of gold, and a sure, delicate hand to produce this unique work. Rooms 9 and 10 house large canvases by Benedetto Bonfigli, a fairly talented painter of the Perugian Renaissance. These works inspired H. V. Morton to dub the museum a "haunt of exquisite musical angels," and their cityscapes and background buildings offer us a glimpse of Perugia in the 1400s. Room 11 -- alongside a Perugino Adoration of the Magi (1523) and a few Agostino di Duccio Madonnas -- has eight panels depicting the Miracles of St. Bernardino of Siena. They were painted in a 1473 workshop in the limpid, colorful Umbrian style soon to be popularized by Perugino; he and Francesco di Giorgio Martini are two of the artists to whom the panels have been tentatively attributed. After a hall of 17th- and 18th-century majolica from Deruta and the Abruzzi and a chapel frescoed by Benedetto Bonfigli comes room 15, which contains what many visitors come here for: the 15th- and 16th-century art starring large altarpieces by Perugino. The Adoration of the Magi (1475) is an early Perugino work, painted when he was
