This book analyses the life and work of a major and yet under-scrutinised artist of Renaissance Italy: Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481–1536), a contemporary of Raphael, Bramante, Michelangelo and Antonio da Sangallo the younger (to name but a few). Peruzzi was born in Siena, but spent most of his life in Rome where he worked under the patronage of figures including Agostino Chigi, Pope Julius ii and Cardinal Raffaello Riario. Ann C Huppert’s is a well-researched, elegantly written and accessible book which constitutes a major re-assessment of Peruzzi’s position in art history. By focusing on the ‘localities of Siena and Rome’ as ‘the segments of Peruzzi’s career’ (p 3), she reconstructs the artist’s major achievements while analysing the impact that the Spanish sack of Rome in 1527 had on his artistic and personal life.

In her exhaustive introduction, titled ‘The elusive Peruzzi’, Huppert sets herself the major task of reassessing Vasari’s biography of the Sienese artist. She achieves this by bringing to light new documentation — both archival and visual — that convincingly dismantles Vasari’s manipulated portrait and biographical profile of Peruzzi as ‘beleaguered and perpetually undervalued despite his artistic abilities’ (p 5). To substantiate her argument, Huppert also reconstructs the financial history of Peruzzi. Archival evidence showing, for instance, payment records and property acquisitions, provides ‘an alternative picture to Vasari’s depiction of Peruzzi’s lack of financial success’ (p 7).

In chapter one, Huppert focuses on Peruzzi’s architectural formation within the vibrant artistic scene of fifteenth-century Siena. Peruzzi’s exposure to a milieu where drawing ‘as both a design and a tool for self-edification proved fundamental’ (p 18) enabled him at a young age to produce drawings of architectural design that show a mastery of perspective and an extensive knowledge of both mathematical skills and numeracy. Huppert’s reconstruction of Peruzzi’s vernacular education, the legacy of Mariano di Jacopo (known as il Taccola), and the influence of his teacher Francesco di Giorgio Martini, who looked at images, mathematics and perspective as driving forces behind art and engineering, convincingly show the role of Peruzzi’s early years in Siena in shaping his versatile approach to painting and sketching as ‘encompassing figural arts, architecture, and engineering’ (p 28). In this chapter, Huppert also shows how Peruzzi’s networking in Siena secured participation to important commissions that included the refortification of the city’s walls and work in Siena Cathedral as well as the design for a number of private palaces.

Chapter two traces Peruzzi’s period in Rome, where the artist’s career reached its apogee. The Eternal City also marked a further development of Peruzzi’s ‘widespread interest in antiquity’ (p 49). Here, Huppert analyses a large number of drawings produced by Peruzzi in this period. In so doing, she explains in detail Peruzzi’s methodological shift from a pictorial to an architectural approach that marks the originality of his drawing. To better comprehend the architectural focus of Peruzzi’s drawings, ‘consisting especially of carefully measured details and displaying an attentiveness to material and structural issues’ (p 60), Huppert also analyses the artist’s rich sketchbook (taccuino dei viaggi), which contains drawings of ancient buildings situated in Rome and along the coast of southern Latium. Moreover, analysis of Peruzzi’s work is located within the broader context of Rome’s art scene where artists such as Raphael, despite emphasising the importance of precise measurements and drawing techniques in sketching Roman ancient monuments, produced, nonetheless, drawings that ‘continued to use perspective, a representational method grounded in the figural arts’ (p 58). In concluding this chapter, Huppert looks at Peruzzi’s drawings of ancient architecture as a series of sketches representing parts rather than wholes, indeed ‘a kit of parts to be recomposed imaginatively in new designs’ (p 93). It was this approach that would allow the painter Peruzzi to apply the practical knowledge of architecture he acquired in Rome in his new design projects.

Chapter three analyses Peruzzi’s most important projects in both painting and architecture. Focusing on Rome, Bologna and Siena, Huppert looks at Peruzzi’s work in Villa Chigi, Santa Maria della Pace, Saint Peter’s, San Petronio, in Bologna, and San Domenico, in Siena, to name but a few. From the Sala delle prospettive in Villa Chigi to the frescos executed for the Ponzetti chapel in Santa Maria della Pace and the ground-breaking drawings of Saint Peter’s and San Petronio, Huppert’s detailed analysis shows the multidisciplinary nature of Peruzzi’s art. It is in the versatility of his design techniques that she recognises Peruzzi’s major contribution to Renaissance art design. Indeed, this was achieved through his ability to merge perspective, mathematical analysis and a deep knowledge of antiquity as well as the ‘birds-eye cut-away view’ technique that made Peruzzi’s drawings appear ‘to grow from the two-dimensional plan at the bottom of the page into the three-dimensional forms at the top’ (p 115).

The concluding chapter of this book analyses Peruzzi’s legacy. Huppert’s discussion of his influence on a number of artists, such as his son Sallustio Peruzzi, her analysis of primary sources which refer to the existence of an unpublished treatise by Peruzzi, ‘which has yet come to light’ (p 154), but above all the influence of Peruzzi’s technically ground-breaking architectural drawings, all provide an interesting overview of the artist’s legacy. What is more, Peruzzi’s challenge of Vitruvius’ text and his deep interest in the physical fabric of Rome’s ancient monuments ‘provided evidence about the ancient manner of building equal to if not more compelling than Vitruvius’ (p 167).

Together with a solid historical analysis that engages with an emerging academic debate on Peruzzi, this book’s major contribution lies in Huppert’s choice to focus on the artist’s rich production of drawings, some of which are made available in print for the first time. In so doing, she takes the reader into a visual journey that reconstructs Peruzzi’s career and, more importantly, the making of his ideas. Accordingly, this book achieves its main goal – namely, to re-assess Baldassarre Peruzzi’s role as a major artist of Renaissance Italy.