PANICALE AND CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE
THE small town of Panicale crowns one of the chain of small hills to the south of Lake Trasimene. There are views down across the lake: to the left, the promontory of Castiglione del Lago with its Cinquecento palace of the della Corgna and, to the right, the Isola Polisena, the church on which boasts the grandest of Perugian Renaissance crucifixes. But it is not for these, nor for the cluster of buildings round the handsome Collegiata, that we have come. A little way to the east is the small church of San Sebastiano. Here in 1505 Perugino painted a fresco of the martyrdom of the saint. Much admired in the nineteenth century, this is hardly à la mode. Sebastian awaits his fate with a calm indifference; the tightly silhouetted archers are more elegant than menacing, balletic almost in their motions. Behind is an arcade of admirably simplicity through which we see the lake framed by descending ridges.
Perugino’s idealized forms were matched by his inspired response to the landscape he knew so well, and it was through this that his influence would endure for centuries. Born Pietro Vannucci, the painter belonged to a moderately prosperous family of Castel del Plebis, now Città della Pieve, some twenty-five kilometres to the south-west. When age and changing taste meant that Perugino had fewer commissions from patrons elsewhere, he returned to work in his native territory. The best known of his frescoes at Città della Pieve is the rather laboured Adoration of the Magi set above trompe l’oeil wainscotting in the Oratorio dei Bianchi. More intriguing is what remains of the Deposition in the church of the Servites. Perugino himself designed the composition, but asked the sculptor Andrea Sansovino to make a model for this, a rare survival now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Conscious no doubt of his weakening abilities, the veteran painter was nonetheless determined to give of his best. The early campanile of the Duomo is the only significant structure within the walls that Perugino would recognize. Opposite this is the handsome but unfinished sixteenth-century palace designed by Galeazzo Alessi for a papal nephew, Ascanio della Corgna, who called in Niccolò Pomarancio to decorate some of the interiors. With its elegant door-case and window-frames, the palace stands out in the predominantly brick town.
Oratorio di Santa Maria dei Bianchi: Pietro Perugino and studio, trompe l’oeil wainscotting below the Adoration of the Magi, fresco, 1504.