Pinturicchio

Pinturicchio, or Pintoricchio (US: /ˌpɪntəˈriːkioʊ/, Italian: [pintuˈrikkjo]; born Bernardino di Betto; 1454–1513), also known as Benetto di Biagio or Sordicchio, was an Italian Renaissance painter. He acquired his nickname (meaning "little painter") because of his small stature and he used it to sign some of his artworks that he produced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Pinturicchio was born the son of Benedetto or Betto di Biagio, in Perugia. In his career, he may have trained under lesser-known Perugian painters such as Bonfigli and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. According to Vasari, Pinturicchio was a paid assistant of Perugino.

The works of the Perugian Renaissance school are very similar and often paintings by Perugino, Pinturicchio, Lo Spagna, and a young Raphael may be mistaken, one for the other. In the execution of large frescoes, pupils and assistants had a large share in the work, either in enlarging the master's sketch to the full-sized cartoon, in transferring the cartoon to the wall, or in painting backgrounds or accessories.

His assignment in Rome, to decorate the Sistine Chapel, was an experience fraught with learning from prominent artists of the time, including: Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Vanucci, and Luca Signorelli. The Sistine Chapel was where it is believed that Pinturicchio was collaborating with Perugino to some extent. Pinturicchio's fresco, Assumption of Mary, executed in 1481 on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, was destroyed in 1535 to make way for Michelangelo's Last Judgement.

After assisting Perugino in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, Pinturicchio was employed by various members of the Della Rovere family to decorate the Semi-Gods Ceiling of Palazzo dei Penitenzieri as well as a series of chapels in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where he appears to have worked from 1484, or earlier, until 1492.

Critic Evelyn March Phillipps sums up his work by saying that the basilica "[w]ould be if it had been left with all its original decorations, one of the finest monuments to Pintoricchio’s art in Italy. A great deal remains, but much has been swept away".

The earliest known of his works is an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the Della Rovere Chapel, the first chapel (from the west) on the south, built by Cardinal Domenico della Rovere. In the lunettes under the vault, Pinturicchio painted small scenes from the life of St. Jerome. The polychrome grotesque wall decoration on a yellow-gold background probably was inspired by the paintings of the Domus Aurea, and belongs the earliest and highest quality of their kind in Rome.

The frescos he painted in the Cybo Chapel, built by Cardinal Lorenzo Cybo de Mari in the beginning of the sixteenth century, were destroyed in 1682, when the chapel was rebuilt by Cardinal Alderano Cybo. The old fresco of the Virgin and the Child by Pinturicchio was detached from the wall and sent by the cardinal to Massa in 1687. The fragment was re-used as the altarpiece of the Ducal Chapel of the Cathedral of Massa.