Those of you who have studied Italian renaissance art may feel that in at least the case of Perugino here's an artist with no need of rehabilitation, figuring as he does in the major collections of the world and with a reputation that has withstood centuries. But this is not strictly true, and what is the case in an indirect way with Perugino is much more obviously the case with Pintoricchio. Both artists have, in fact, suffered demolition jobs at the hands of Giorgio Vasari, Europe's first art historian and the person from whom we learn the vast majority of all that we know about Italian renaissance artists. And what Vasari wrote in the mid 16th century has laid the basis for the way these artists have been viewed ever since.

Why this has happened can of course be argued about, but in my view it has a lot to do with the fact that both painters were Umbrians, outside the boundaries of the Toscana that was Vasari's frame of reference and around which he constructed his entire account of what the Renaissance meant. Later on I will investigate this point more thoroughly, but at this stage I should say that perhaps my real motive for talking to you about these artists is a form of patriotism not completely different from that which motivated Vasari himself. I have been living in Italy for close to twenty years now, and one of the things that familiarity with the place makes abundantly clear is that patriotism there is as strong locally as it is weak nationally, at least if you compare it to places like France or England.

As a nation, Italy is barely any older than Australia, but the loyalties that Italians feel to their specific places of origin are deep and tenacious, and my years in the umbrian countryside seem to have planted the same seed in me . For too long and unjustifiably Umbria has been in the shadow of Toscana, and I'm proud of the fact that in recent years the region is finally emerging as a place with it's own distinct characteristics. You can imagine, then, why I would find it a bit annoying to see Umbrian artists being given less than their due in the pages of Vasari. But let's return to our artists and in particular to the two major fresco cycles that I want to concentrate on today.

These are Perugino's Collegio del Cambio – here's a general view as you walk in off Perugia's Corso Vannucci - P1, and the Baglioni chapel in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore by Pinturicchio, hidden away in the delightful town of Spello which shares the same mountain backdrop as Assisi. Here's a view of the Annunciation that he painted there on the left hand wall. Both these fresco cycles can be dated to 1500, give or take a year, when Perugino had just turned 50 and Pintoricchio was in his early forties, and they represent for both artists a kind of high point after which their fortunes and reputations suffered a rapid and inexorable decline. To understand the full extent of this fall from grace it's necessary to go back a bit in time and see just how extraordinary the 20 years or so leading up to the turn of the century had been for both these men. Their origins are still, unfortunately, largely shrouded in mystery, as is often the case with the great renaissance painters, but we do know that Perugino was from 1470 apprenticed in Florence to the very capable artist Verrocchio, where he would have been a fellow student with Sandro Botticelli and the young Leonardo da Vinci, of whom he is an almost exact contemporary.

By 1475 he was back in Perugia where he must have startled the local artists with this very impressive “Adoration of the Magi”, a painting using the new oil medium which pulls together Tuscan elements and also the Flemish realism which was making a big impression in Florence at the time. There are two things I want to point out here. One is the use of a lake in the background, which was to become a signature theme of his painting and the Umbrian school in general: Perugino was born in the town of Città della Pieve which looks out onto Lake Trasimeno, and he was deeply attached to it. The other is the youthful self-portrait, which he has put in on the extreme left and which shows him at the age of 25 and at the beginning of his fame.

Three years after the completion of this painting there occurred an event which had wide reaching implications for the politics and art of the renaissance. This was the 1478 Pazzi conspiracy, in which a disgruntled faction in Florence headed by the Pazzi family attempted to overthrow the rule of their too successful rivals the Medici. The failed plot had the backing of the Pope, Sixtus IV, who had just begun the building of the Sistine Chapel , and the result was a violent conflict between Florence and the Papacy which meant that for two years it was unthinkable for any Florentine artist to collaborate on a papal project.

This was a godsend for an Umbrian like Perugino who clearly had no intention of establishing himself permanently in Florence, and so it was that he obeyed the papal summons in 1478 to become the chief painter and coordinator of the great project to decorate the new chapel. We see his “Christ handing the keys to St Peter”, which seems a manifesto of all that the renaissance has meant so far with its refined classicism, idealized architecture and measured relationship between the figures and their context. This and its companion paintings in the Sistine chapel make up what is without doubt Rome's most impressive fresco cycle of the entire 15th century, and I'm amongst those who think the decision to destroy a significant part of them to make way for Michelangelo's “Last Judgement” was a great shame.

By 1481 the hostilities were over and the full Tuscan team arrived in Rome, but Perugino had already used the opportunity to lay down the essential principles of the great project and to establish his reputation as one of the leading artists of his times. And he had gathered around himself a group of assistants and collaborators which included the young Pinturicchio. Bernardino had been born, like Perugino, into a poor family – in fact almost all the artists of the renaissance came from decidedly humble origins, a situation that has its origins in aristocratic prejudice against manual work - and seems to have been first apprenticed in the workshop of a jeweller, which might partly explain his lifelong devotion to fine detail.

From the same source we are also informed that he was congenitally deaf – his reputation for irascibility may be coming from this – and also exceptionally small. But unlike Perugino he never went to Florence and his participation in the decoration of the Sistine chapel would have been his first major commission, and the first one outside Perugia. Here's a detail from the Baptism of Christ there that is thought to be by him. But Pintoricchio must have learnt fast on the job, and over the next years he would find himself constantly in the company of the major figures of the day. This is a point worth dwelling on , because we have examples here – Leonardo da Vinci is another – of the spectacular rise of people from the humblest origins to the highest levels that society had to offer at the time. Art was thus the vehicle for formidable social mobility, and so we have the little jeweller's apprentice from a poor part of Perugia being first taken into the retinue of the Pope's powerful brother, Cardinal Domenico della Rovere, and then being commissioned by the succeeding Pope, Innocent VIII, to do work a number of works in the Vatican.

But his biggest break yet came with the election of Rodrigo Borgia as Alexander VI. There must have been something about Pintoricchio's art that particularly endeared him to this Pontiff, as he gave him the major commission of painting his private rooms, known as the Borgia apartments. Here's a view of the resurrection there with Pope Alexander a pious observer - and here's one of a series of allegorical panels devoted to the arts, in this case music. This esteem or even friendship seems to have extended to the Pope's brilliant but ill-fated son Cesare Borgia, who held the painter in the highest regard. We have a letter that he wrote in 1498 while camped in the Umbrian town of Deruta – then as now the major ceramics centre of our area – in which he takes him into his service and decrees that he be treated as “one of ours”. Such letters as these would have been worth more than their weight in gold, and just up the road from Spello's Santa Maria Maggiore in the church of Sant'Andrea, Pintoricchio has left us an exquisite rendering of one in the form of a still life at the feet of the four saints and Virgin and Child on a beautiful altar piece he painted there, still in its original position. The letter on the stool is from Cardinal Baglioni and amongst affectionate assurances he begs him to return to work in Siena, a town which thereafter – the letter is from 1508 - became his home and where he spent the last part of his life.

Pintoricchio is always notable for his detail, but this picture within the picture is a little masterpiece and shows us how well he has adapted the Flemish passion for the small object to the relatively large scale of the Italian altarpiece, at the same time as using the opportunity to sing his own praises. It would be fair to say then, that around the year 1500 we have a situation where a pair of Umbrian artists are occupying the highest levels of patronage and reputation within the world of Italian art, particularly in Roman circles and in general those areas like Perugia and above all Siena which had significantly different political and artistic tradition from Florence. In the work of Pintoricchio in particular it's possible to see strands of northern art and echoes of international gothic reworked in classical mode which are what the Italian renaissance might well have looked like had it been Siena and not Florence which came out ahead in their long war.

Here's an image  of Pintoricchio's altarpiece from Santa Maria dei Fossi, now one of the gems of the Umbrian National Gallery at Perugia, where you can see very clearly this blend of classicism – particularly noticeable in the elaborate frame which is an integral part of the image and was designed before the painting to the artist's specification – and Flemish inspired realism, most obvious in the rendition of the jewels and the misty landscape behind. In fact, the only positive thing that Vasari finds to say about Pintoricchio in his “Life” is that he must be credited with bringing the new, realistic way of treating landscape that had first been developed in the north to Italy and adapting it to the different scale of Italian painting. But I will come back to Vasari later. The renaissance art world being the ruthlessly competitive place that it was - and to achieve these levels of excellence how could it not have been? - it's not difficult to see, then, that there would have been strong forces at work ready to unseat those artists who were not only considered indecently successful but were also representative of foreign political interests, foreign that is to those of Florence.

But there was also another factor working against our two painters which was much less historically inevitable, and that is the coming to maturity in this period of a trio of artists the like of which European art had never seen before. Perugino's generation had the exceptional misfortune to be the background against which the dramas of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael was played out, and it's hard not to sympathize with them. Leonardo, fellow apprentice with Perugino in the workshop of Verrocchio and only two years younger than him, though he never achieved in his lifetime the levels of acclaim of the other two, was the real mould breaker here, the man who set the new bench mark against which all art would now be judged, but his example was soon taken up by Michelangelo and art was never the same again. Indeed it could be said that the generation of the High Renaissance marks the end of a centuries long march, that thread of progress that provides the background of Vasari's account of the Renaissance and which has remained the dominant view ever since, by which each generation, while not necessarily greater as artists, was certainly more accomplished from a technical point of view than the one that came before. Leonardo made the celebrated remark that all good students must outdo their masters, but in his own work reached such a high point that from him on “progress” in art stops being a quality that can be measured in any meaningful way from a technical point of view. But let's return to our artists and their enjoyment of this great few years round the turn of the century when they were the toast of the town.

There is a celebrated letter, in fact, of this very year from Italy's leading banker and one of the great art patrons of the time, Agostino Chigi – it was for him that Raphael and Giuliano Romano frescoed the Villa Farnesina in Rome – in which he responds to a question by his father over whom he should go to for the decoration of the family chapel in Siena. Perugino, he replies, is “il meglio maestro d'Italia” - the best painter in Italy, - and Pintoricchio his disciple is the only other one that counts. It's hard to imagine higher praise, and the bankers of Perugia must have been very happy indeed when in 1498 or 9 they signed a contract with Perugino to decorate the Collegio del Cambio, that is the financial centre of the town where the banking was conducted. Here's a view of the ceiling elaborately decorated with astrological and mythological elements, tied into a specific form of decoration known to art historians as grotesque. There's a story attached to the use of the word grotesque in this context - here's a close up view and another to show the way it borders the panels - which is worth taking a little detour into because it throws an interesting light on this period around the turn of the century when there is hardly a fresco cycle in production which is not provided with decorative borders of this type.

As we all know, one of the most powerful motivations of the renaissance was its rediscovery of the classical world, doubly significant to Italians because it was their own ancestors who could take the credit for it. This was the background then to the first real archaeological campaigns and in Rome if you started digging it was hard not to discover things. And so it was that in the vicinity of the Coliseum, nicknamed thus because it was built near where a colossal gilded statue of the emperor Nero had previously stood, holes in the ground were found which led into a maze of underground vaults lavishly decorated with a highly specific kind of fresco work which we know to have been a phase in the continually evolving body of roman wall painting from the middle of the first century AD, but which artists and humanists of the renaissance took to be the definitive look of ancient art.

They had come across the lowest levels of Nero's Golden House, all that was left of what had once been the biggest palace ever built in Europe which had been destroyed following the emperor's suicide in 68 AD, and they began immediately to use it as a model for the decoration of renaissance palaces. Our word grotesque is thus a derivation of the Italian word grotta, or cave, which is what these holes in the ground seemed to be, and has the meaning it does because of the little grimacing faces that were an integral part of the style. There is a final point here which bears particularly on Pintoricchio, which is that when a few years ago the Italian authorities began a major restoration of this archaeological area – in Italian it's called the “Domus Aurea” - with a view to making it accessible to the public, they found interesting graffiti which must have been done in the 1480's by the young artists then working on the decoration of the newly built Sistine chapel who had let themselves down on ropes and would have wandered from room to room marvelling at the roman fresco work. In particular there are two lines scratched into the plaster which finish with the words “Pintoricchio Sodomita”, which may or may not be a true description of our painter, but give some idea of the social world in which our artists were navigating.

The subject of the frescoes in the Collegio del Cambio -  here's a view of the first of the left hand panels - is one dear to the hearts of renaissance humanists, and that is to bring together the classical and biblical traditions and make them a seemless whole. This was a particularly pressing issue at the time because it was by no means apparent how these two very different realities could be reconciled, and with pontiffs like the corrupt and licentious Rodrigo Borgia occupying the papacy there were many who must have been murmuring, or more, that the new humanism was simply a cover for outright paganism. The approach adopted here was to establish parallel lineages of biblical and classical figures, with notable personalities from the greco-roman world seen as ethical precursors to the christian one. Perugino's pictorial solution is to line them up on the two left hand panels - here we see amongst others Pericles, Cincinattus and Leonidas the spartan, in the previous panel were Socrates and the emperor Trajan.

These are in my view beautiful images whether or not we think they are accurate representations of the people – and this they certainly weren't – and the whole cycle is in the most wonderful state of preservation, but there is a certain statoc quality to the lineup that is not altogether satisfactory. But on the facing wall, where we find grouped together sybils and biblical prophets, the former being regarded in renaissance times as having been the voices of the ancient world that predicted the coming of the christian era, the pace changes and Perugino excells himself with a composition of grace and complexity. It's interesting to note that while he worked on this project he had the help of an exceptional assistant, the 16 year old Raffaello Sanzio, just arrived from Urbino and newly apprenticed to the Umbrian painter from whom he would shortly learn all that he had to teach.

Raphael's debt to his first master remained very great, though – here's a painting of Perugino's called “La Madonna del Sacco” which for those of you familiar with Raphael's work shows just how much he modelled himself on his first master - and even in his mature style when he had taken on the the influence of first Leonardo and then Michelangelo there remained a lot of the colour, grace and tranquility of Perugino. I hope I'm not doing a disservice to him, then, – here we are back amongst the prophets, and here,  with the sybils– when I suggest that on this side of the chamber we might be looking at one of the earliest example of the pictorial genius of the young Raphael, though it could equally be that the experience of working here with Perugino set him on the road that would lead just a few years later to his justly celebrated work in the Vatican “Stanze” and compositions like “The school of Athens”, which, interestingly, is involved in just the same attempt to synthesise the pagan and biblical past that we have here in the Collegio del Cambio.

To set his mark on the project Perugino has left us with an excellent self portrait – here he is looking at us rather severely from between the lined up luminaries of ancient history on the left hand side, a man about to turn fifty who had reached the very heights of his profession. He is following a tradition here that was begun by Filippo Lippi with his self portrait amongst the figures in his fresco cycle in Spoleto, and would be imitated within a year by Signorelli in Orvieto and Pintoricchio at Spello. A bit like the grotesque decoration, these signature self portraits must have been very much the thing a successful artist did around the year1500. From the hill of Perugia it's just possible to see the town of Spello on the distant slopes of Mt Subasio, and it was here at the same time as Perugino and Raphael were finishing the Collegio del Cambio that Pintoricchio was commissioned to paint the three walls of a chapel in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore - here we have again his Annunciation there.

Once more we have the sybils – in this case painted on the ceiling – acting as the link between the ancient and christian worlds, a Nativity, and finally an interesting scene of the young Christ disputing theology with the priests in front of the temple. You'll notice here the atmospheric landscape, the idealized classical architecture and the artfully disposed books in the foreground which give Pintoricchio the chance once again to do a kind of still life that acts as a subplot to the main theme and demonstrates his skill in depicting objects.

The chapel takes its name from Troilo Baglioni, the figure dressed in black on the far left, who as bishop of Spello was the commissioner of the project. The Baglioni family were in fact the powerful clan in control of Perugia for a lot of the 15th century, and whose bloody feuding had become legendary throughout Italy. It's hard to imagine from the relatively peaceful portraits in this picture – here is a close-up of Troilo and one of his retainers - that in the very year of this fresco there had been one of the most savage episodes in the history Perugia in which the young Grifonetto Baglioni had exterminated most of the rest of his family following an extravagant wedding party, only to be killed in his turn by the survivors. This, by the way, is the background to Raphael's celebrated “Deposition” which was done for the grieving mother, Atalanta, of the young Grifonetto. They were not to know it, of course , but the remaining members of the family would shortly be strangled in prison by the agents of Pope Paul III Farnese at the end of the so called Salt War of 1540, and their houses used as the basement for a great papal castle, the Rocca Paolina.

Returning to our frescoes, here's a view of the third of the panels, a nativity, where we once again have a lovely atmospheric landscape, and you'll notice also that the delightfully ruined stable is decorated with the same grotesque panels that we see framing the frescoes. Not to be outdone by his colleague Perugino, Pintoricchio has also left us a self portrait as his signature, looking out at us from an elaborate frame and surmounted by one of his characteristic still lifes with books, candle and maybe wine in a beautifully rendered little jug. Underneath we read that he is Bernadino, the painter from Perugia. The fall from grace of our artists, while not necessarily as dramatic as that which befell the Baglioni family, was nevertheless precipitous.

In the year 1500 Michelangelo began work on his celebrated statue of David, finishing it in 1504, and in 1505 both he and Leonardo spent much time on preparations for a pair of frescoes – in the case of Leonardo he experimented disastrously with oil paint on plaster - to commemorate victories of the Florentine republic over its enemies. Neither was ever finished, but the dynamism and sheer energy of both great projects caused a sensation, and the peaceful harmonies and gentle reflectiveness of an artist like Perugino must suddenly have looked like they belonged to an earlier age. When just a few years later Michelangelo's work in the Sistine chapel and Raphael's in the Vatican “Stanze” came into the public domain, it was clear that new and powerful winds were blowing, and the old guard must have been faced with with the depressing prospect of either adapting to the new game or being left behind. We read of a dinner, in fact, hosted by the architect Bramante in 1508 or 1509 at which were present Perugino, Pintoricchio and Luca Signorelli, amongst others, at a time when all three were working on the frescoes in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. They were well and truly out of fashion by now, and it would have been very interesting indeed to hear the bitter complaints of these men who only a few years before were regarded as the best in the country. Perugino is on record as expressing his bewilderment that the very same figures he painted years before that brought him great praise were now derided, and he must have thought it very unfair indeed how much the winds of change had blown against him. He died in 1523, outliving Leonardo with whom he'd shared teenage years in the workshop of Verrocchio.

About Pintoricchio's feelings we are less well informed but the bitterness and bizarre behaviour that are said to have characterised his last years are sign enough of what they must have been. He died in Siena in 1513, according to Vasari from rage that a box found in a room where he was painting that he had ordered taken away was discovered, when it later split open, to have had gold coins in it. There is no evidence of this spiteful story outside Vasari, who was writing half a century later; on the contrary Pintoricchio may have been out of fashion but he was far too well off and highly esteemed in Siena for it to be at all likely.

At this point I want to return to the issue with which I began and examine in more detail just what Giorgio Vasari has to say about our two painters. He is writing in the middle of the 16th century, his revised edition published in 1568, and he was of course a painter himself, though not a particularly good one, as anyone who's had a good look at the acres of plaster that are covered with his work in the duomo of Florence would agree. He was also responsible, it seems, for the fresco that was laid over the top of Leonardo's failed Battle of Anghiari. As a Tuscan from Arezzo who had made it to the very top – he was showered with honours and commissions in his life, and was the founder of the first art academy – he had some of the complexes and exaggerated patriotism of the provincial made good, and having been apprenticed to the ageing Michelangelo he was firmly convinced that the whole history of art was a series of steps leading up to the great master who had finally demonstrated what perfection on earth really meant.

He does of course admit the merits of artists like Leonardo, Raphael, and grudgingly Titian, but he can't help seeing them as better or worse approximations to Buonarotti. It's important to note, too, that being the very first work of art history Vasari had no precedents to work from, and it was only natural that he would look to classical literature for inspiration, and in particular to the “Lives” of Plutarch which had become one of the foundation texts of renaissance humanism. Plutarch's “Lives” are notable – amongst other things – for their exemplary nature, and in particular for the way the goddess Fortune can be seen to operate in the lives of men. This was a theme that surfaces contemporaneously in Macchiavelli whose hero, Cesare Borgia, despite having all the gifts that a statesman and soldier could ask for, is brought down by a particularly malignant set of circumstances.

What Vasari does with his life of Pintoricchio – ironically, Cesare Borgia's favourite artist - is in my view the counter example to this, the negative life that he had to put in to act as counterpoint to the positive ones, and to establish the rhetorical principal that fickle fortune could not only bring down the worthy but could also elevate the unworthy. His opening lines are “Just as there are many aided by fortune who have not been endowed with much talent, so on the contrary there are countless talented men persecuted by adverse and hostile fortune. Thus it is common knowledge that fortune adopts as her children those who depend on her without the help of any talent, for she likes to raise up some with her own favour who would never have been recognized through her own worth.This is what happened with Pintoricchio from Perugia, who even though he executed many works and was assisted by various people, nonetheless enjoyed a reputation much greater than he deserved.”

The rest of his account continues in much the same vein, the most negative in his whole book. In particular he pours scorn on the decoration of the Borgia apartments - here's Justice from the allegorical series there - where he can't forgive Pintoricchio for having used elaborate gold and stucco elements in a way that must have reminded him of the hated gothic – he describes it as the German style – which the renaissance was in his account trying to put behind it. The only work that he is prepared to admire is the Piccolomini Library in Siena – here are some images from that extraordinary room but he assigns the credit here to Raphael whom he says was responsible for the preparatory drawings. And he ends with the unpleasant story of his death from rage and envy, altogether a most ungenerous assessment, and in my view a wrong one too, as anyone who approaches his work without preconceptions would agree. At this distance in time its very hard to know, but I have the impression that Vasari is not simply exercising a rhetorical device and indulging in florentine patriotism in his demolition of Pintoricchio, unique among the major artists of the renaissance in never having worked in Florence, but is also picking up on a pervasive hostility amongst his peers that seemed to have surrounded the artist in his lifetime and was still there for Vasari to tap into some years later.

This might have been exacerbated by the difficult personality of a short man with bad hearing, but could also have been the result of simple envy. The patronage that in particular the great personalities of the roman and sienese clergy always directed to him, plus what all agree was a quite extraordinary facility at getting a good likeness and in rapidly and efficiently finishing his commissions, would have been sufficient to make him unpopular with his colleagues if he was also very hard to work with. Who knows, the “Pintoricchio sodomita” scratched into the vault of Nero's golden house might also point to a hidden subtext that in some way helped to poison the reputation of this painter. Whatever the case, generations of critics have followed Vasari's lead and it is only in recent times that his star has once again started to shine.

The situation with Perugino is more nuanced, and Vasari is unable to deny him the status of a great artist who achieved recognition not only throughout Italy but also internationally. But he nevertheless manages to undermine him very efficiently in what has been described as a small masterpiece of oblique execration. He starts with the story that Perugino was born desperately poor – an exaggeration, modern research having established that his father was of minor artisan status, not peasantry – and uses this to establish the idea that because of his early poverty he was prepared in later life to do anything for money including lowering his standards and endlessly repeating himself.

He then takes the opportunity, when recreating the talk Perugino's first master allegedly gives to the young painter urging him to go to Florence, to give a wonderful description of that city; ruthlessly competitive, industrious, overflowing with brilliant ideas, a place where the air itself produces free spirits unwilling to accept mediocrity. But he does so in order to insinuate that all Perugino became later could be attributed to his stay in Florence and not to any natural talent he might have had. He follows this with a remark to the effect that Michelangelo despised his work – in 1550 Buonarotti had achieved apotheosis and this was as definitive a condemnation as could be imagined - and then tells a story of how Perugino, always travelling with lots of money on his person because he trusted nobody, was on one occasion robbed and although he recovered most of the money he nearly died from the rage he suffered as a result. But he saves the deepest cut to the end when he says that he was a person of very little religion and that no one could ever make him believe in the immortality of the soul. “He placed all his hopes in the gifts of fortune” writes Vasari, “and would have struck any evil bargain for money”. In the middle fifteenth century with the counter-reformation in full swing this was a very serious thing to say, and in asserting it Vasari cuts at the very roots of Perugino's art, denying its spirituality. All those saints, all those prophets and Virgins were in this view just so many ordinary people acting out an empty drama.

I would like to finish with a word about Perugino's later manner, because while there is some truth in what Vasari says about him repeating himself - here, for example, is the nativity scene from the end wall of the Collegio del Cambio, and here's a nativity from a few years later at Montefalco which shows that the same cartoons have been used, the increasing blandness of his compositions in the years after 1505 goes hand in hand with a striking and even impressionistic use of colour. Daring colour combinations were always a hallmark of his style, much imitated by his followers and in particular Raphael, and in this later period the colours become the principal means by which the pictures are constructed, the forms dissolving into a misty and evanescent unity which represents beautifully the soft and atmospheric quality of the Umbrian landscape. And finally, one last image from his repertoire, a Mary Magdalene that he painted at almost the same time as Leonardo's Mona Lisa, and in whose expert modelling and delicate “sfumature” one can see that, when he wanted, he could paint with the best.