Saints

Pietro Vannucci, known as il Perugino
fresco
1521

In 1520, following a short illness, Raphael died suddenly in Rome, never having completed the San Severo fresco; thereafter the Camaldolese monks approached Pietro Perugino and he agreed to their request to finish the work. The ageing maestro completed the lower portion of the fresco in 1512, painting six full length figures of the saints: Santa Scolastica, San Girolamo, San Giovanni Evangelista, San Gregorio Magno, San Bonifacio and Santa Marta. Perugino used some of his existing stencils for these figures, meaning ready-made designs (the technique involved figures drawn on paper that was then perforated with a pin to form shapes that could then be transferred to another surface by pressing a pad covered in dust, often charcoal, onto the paper) used to transfer contours to the plastered walls which were then painted over.

Parts of the fresco still bear traces of the stencil technique used by Perugino. This was a studio-specific technique the Umbrian painter had mastered and which was used between the 15th and 16th centuries in the two studios he owned in Florence and in Perugia, where Raphael was trained, respectively. The figure of San Girolamo in San Severo is the same form as that used by  Perugino, with the support of his studio, in 1507 for his oil painting of Madonna di Loreto, commissioned for the church Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi di Perugia, which now hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.