Pietro Perugino was an important painter of the Italian Renaissance known for his fiery temperament and lack of religious belief. The artist’s skill at conveying perspectival space and clarity of form is evinced in his work The Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter (1481–1482). “Although he was of mean appearance and ignoble character, he had an unmistakable power in painting mild-eyed Madonnas and spotless saints against delicate landscape backgrounds,” the biographer Jennie Ellis Keysor once wrote of him. Born Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci c. 1450 in Città della Pieve, Italy, little is known of his early life but it is thought he may have been the pupil of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo in Perugia. By 1472, Perugino was living in Florence, where he apprenticed alongside Leonardo da Vinci in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. In the years that followed, the artist produced a number of frescoes for churches and palaces. Unlike his larger religious scenes, Perugino’s portraits show the influence of the Flemish painter Hans Memling in their elegant simplicity. The artist’s most famous pupil was Raphael, whose work assimilated certain aspects of Perugino’s paintings but later surpassed them. He died in 1523 in Fontignano, Italy. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the National Gallery in London, among others.