Madonna and Child

Around 1515, when this small panel was made, Perugino was well into his sixties and taste had moved on. Raphael, who had learned the gentle Umbrian manner in Perugia, was now painting the papal rooms in the Vatican. Perugino's workshop kept supplying what had made his name, devotional pictures built from drawings reused again and again. The biographer Giorgio Vasari tells how Florentines had mocked one of his altarpieces for repeating figures they had seen before, and Perugino replied that they had praised those same figures the first time. That habit is part of this Madonna's story. Versions of the composition survive in several European collections, and scholars have argued since 1864 about how much of this one is his own hand. Most have accepted Perugino, while others see a follower or the workshop in the heavier drapery and the hands. The Italian state bought it with the rest of the Borghese collection in 1902.