Christ and the Woman of Samaria

Perugino · 1500–05

Medium

Tempera on panel, transferred to canvas

Original size

27.3 × 46.3 cm (10 3/4 × 18 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Perugino's *Christ and the Woman of Samaria* distills one of the New Testament's most intimate encounters into a scene of extraordinary stillness, the figures posed against the painter's characteristic soft Umbrian hills and luminous sky. Pietro Perugino was the dominant master of central Italian painting in the decades around 1500, and this panel shows why. His figures are idealized without being cold — graceful, serene, and arranged with a quiet geometric logic that lends even casual gestures a sense of purpose. Working in tempera on panel, he achieved smooth, porcelain-like flesh tones and a clarity of colour that influenced an entire generation of painters, most famously his pupil Raphael, who absorbed Perugino's compositional calm before pushing it toward something more dynamic. Perugino ran one of the most productive workshops in Renaissance Italy, with studios in both Florence and Perugia operating simultaneously — a fact that explains both his enormous output and the occasional unevenness critics have noted in his later career. This work, dated to the early 1500s, shows him still at the height of his powers. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's delicate tonality and measured grace onto canvas, preserving the contemplative mood that makes this painting one of Perugino's most quietly compelling works.