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Around 1470 Pietro Perugino arrived in Florence, Italy, and joined the workshop of the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, working alongside future rivals and colleagues including the painters Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and, for a time, the young Leonardo da Vinci. Ten years later Pope Sixtus IV called him to Rome to help decorate the walls of a chapel newly built inside the Vatican.

That chapel was the Sistine Chapel, and Perugino led the team of Florentine and Umbrian painters brought in to fresco its side walls, decades before Michelangelo ever touched its ceiling. His scene there, Christ Handing the Keys to St Peter, painted around 1481, arranges its figures across a wide, calm piazza with clean architectural perspective, a composition later Renaissance painters studied closely.

Around 1500 a teenage painter from Urbino named Raphael entered Perugino's workshop in Perugia, a city in the Umbria region of central Italy, and absorbed that same calm, spacious style before leaving to develop it further in Florence and Rome. Perugino kept working into his seventies, painting frescoes in small Umbrian churches until his death near Perugia in 1523.