Pietro Buonaccorsi

Buonaccorsi was born in Florence in 1501. As a child he was apprenticed briefly to a druggist before entering the workshop of the painter Andrea de' Ceri, and then, at around age eleven, the workshop of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, where he trained in disegno by copying the battle cartoons of Michelangelo and Leonardo. He later worked for a painter known as Vaga, who brought him to Rome; the nickname "del Vaga" attached to Buonaccorsi from that association and gave him the name by which he is now known.

In Rome, later biographical sources describe him working in Raphael's circle. He is also associated with Genoa, where the altarpiece Polittico di Sant'Erasmo, now in the Musei di Genova, is attributed to him. He later returned to Rome, where he undertook decorative work for Pope Paul III.

Buonaccorsi died in Rome in October 1547, at the height of his fame, and was buried in the Pantheon. Sources disagree on the exact calendar day, variously giving 14, 19, or 20 October, and the surviving account of the immediate cause, following Vasari, points to exhaustion; no other cause is confirmed. He was about 46 years old.

Institutional and scholarly opinion treats Buonaccorsi as a major transitional figure. Museum catalog entries, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, place him among the leading painters and draughtsmen of the late Renaissance and early Mannerist period in Rome and Genoa. The Italian Art Society, marking the anniversary of his death, noted that he died in Rome at the height of his fame, and scholarship following Vasari has long emphasized his skill as a draughtsman. The Uffizi's institutional biography frames his career as a mediation between the Raphaelesque tradition in Rome and the emergence of Florentine Mannerism, a reading echoed across the museum and auction-house literature that constitutes most of what is written about him today.

Buonaccorsi's market is thin and dominated by museum acquisition rather than repeat trading. The clearest documented benchmark is The Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist, a panel sold at Sotheby's New York on 27 January 2011 for USD 2,098,500 and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; contemporary market reporting described it as a record price for the artist. In the same week, the Met also acquired a tapestry-design drawing, The Marriage Bed of Jupiter and Juno, for USD 782,500. Below this tier, drawings attributed to Buonaccorsi or his circle have traded at far more modest levels, with estimates in the tens of thousands of dollars and, at smaller regional houses, realized prices in the low thousands of euros. The market, in short, is a two-tier one: rare autograph panels and drawings capable of six-figure results, and a wider, thinner pool of studio or circle attributions trading for much less.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Buonaccorsi, and attribution depends on connoisseurship grounded in Vasari's sixteenth-century account and the accumulated scholarship of institutions such as the Uffizi, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Prado. Because so much of his documented output survives as fresco decoration or resides permanently in museum collections, autograph paintings appear at auction only rarely, which is why the 2011 Sotheby's sale remains the clearest price benchmark available. Works described as "circle of" or "studio of" Perino del Vaga are priced, and should be evaluated, very differently from securely attributed autograph paintings and drawings.