Perino del Vaga
1501–1547 · Republic of Florence · Mannerism, Late Renaissance
The story
When imperial troops sacked Rome in 1527, looting the city for months, one of the artists who fled was Perino del Vaga. He had every reason to stay. Born Piero Buonaccorsi in Florence in 1501, he had trained in Rome under Raphael himself, worked on the great fresco cycles in the Vatican, and by his mid-twenties was among the most admired decorators in the city.
The sack ended all of that. Perino made his way to Genoa, the port republic, where the admiral and prince Andrea Doria, then the most powerful man in the city, took him on as court artist. For close to ten years he covered the Palazzo Doria with mythological frescoes and stucco, bringing to Genoa the elegant, antique-flavoured style he had learned in Raphael's shop.
By 1537 Rome had recovered enough to draw him back, and he rose to become chief artist to Pope Paul III, the same position Raphael had once held for an earlier pope. He ran a large workshop and drove himself hard, decorating the papal apartments in the Castel Sant'Angelo. He died in Rome in 1547, at 46, reportedly worn out by overwork and by the debts he kept running up.
