The Adoration of the Child

Around 1500, when this panel was painted, Perugino was the busiest painter in Italy, running workshops in both Florence and Perugia. Patrons wanted exactly this, a calm symmetrical arrangement in even Umbrian daylight, the Virgin and two saints kneeling around the Child on a poplar panel over two metres high. One of them is John the Evangelist. The other carries a bishop's staff and is usually identified as Nicholas, though Augustine has been proposed as well. Within four or five years the taste had moved on. Florence now had Leonardo and the young Michelangelo, and Perugino's manner started to be called repetitive. In 1504 he took Michelangelo to the Florentine magistrates for saying in public that his art was clumsy, and the complaint went nowhere.