Anne Stewart selects The Nativity by Baldassarre Peruzzi from the Ulster Museum collection
Baldassarre Peruzzi’s tender nocturnal Nativity, painted in Rome around 1515, is the first High Renaissance work to enter the Ulster Museum collection. Born in Siena in 1481, Peruzzi was an architect, theatre designer, painter and draughtsman and, after Michelangelo and Raphael, the leading artistic figure working in Rome during the early 1500s. Primarily an architect, Peruzzi designed the most outstanding Renaissance secular building in Rome, the Villa Farnesina, begun in 1506 for the immensely wealthy papal banker Agostino Chigi. Almost all Peruzzi’s painted work was in fresco and much is lost. His oil paintings are extremely rare.
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