ABSTRACT
Any discussion of the elusive concept of beauty in fifteenth-century landscape depiction must confront the limited critical vocabulary used in contemporary descriptions. The garden’s beauty also dwells in its peaceful, sometimes secret, seclusion. The Quattrocento workshop, both out of preference and necessity, tended towards simplification. Ideas and images were translated into straightforward workshop procedures that could be followed by assistants or elaborated by masters. The Quattrocento artists’ marvellous powers of natural description, born of intellectual curiosity and nurtured by study and diligence, were regarded as remarkable well into the sixteenth century. Pietro Perugino’s landscapes are highly artful, with their filigree trees, silhouetted against the sky like flowering grasses on long slender stems, gently undulating hills and hazy distances. The landscapes of Perugino and his pupil Raphael, which mark the turn and beginning of the new century, form part of a painted world which breathes the relaxed air of grazia.
