Benedetto Bonfigli

Benedetto Bonfigli (c. 1420 – July 8, 1496) was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Perugia, and a part of the Umbria school of painters including Raphael and Perugino. He is also known as Buonfiglio. Influenced by the style of Domenico Veneziano, Pietro della Francesca, and Fra Angelico, Bonfigli primarily painted frescos for the church and was at one point employed in the Vatican. His best preserved work is the Annunication, but his masterpiece is the decoration of the chapel of the Palazzo dei Priori. Bonfigli specialized in gonfaloni, a Perugian style using banners painted on canvas or linen. He was the most esteemed painter in Perugia before Perugino, who is said to be his pupil.

Bonfigli trained in Perugia from 1430-1440, while the late-Gothic style was still dominant. He was influenced by the works of Fra Angelico, particularly during his employment in the Vatican by Pope Nicholas V, where many of Angelico's frescoes were displayed in the Cappella Niccolina of the Palazzo Vaticano, the pope's private chapel. Other works, such as Fra Angelico's Cortona Polyptych commissioned in 1437, and the works of Domenico Veneziano in Perugia also heavily influenced Bonfigli's style. Bonfigli's earliest surviving work is a dismembered polyptych, depicting Virgin and Child on the central panel, St. Sebastian and a Bishop Saint on another wing, and what is believed to be St Bernardino of Siena and St Anthony Abbot on another. The painter's first commissioned work is attributed to the Virgin and Child with Two Angels for a chapel near S. Pietro, Perugia on March 7, 1445. A close interpretation of Bonfigli's style is evident in a fresco dated 1446 of SS Catherine and Clement I in S. Cristoforo, Passigano; this piece, likely not the work of Bonfigli, demonstrates the influence the painter had on the region.

Bonfigli reached maturity as an artist between 1450 and 1470. During this period, he painted the Annunciation, a smaller piece but among his most well know and preserved, held in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Bonfigli was influenced by the style of Gozzoli, a Florentine Renaissance painter; his stylistic method is evident in Bonfigli's Annunciation with St. Luke and Vigin and the Four Saints, both held in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Perugia, Italy. According to Giorgio Vasari, the Perugian artist painted the Adoration of the Magi coupled with a predella of

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