Antonio del Massaro

Antonio del Massaro, called il Pastura (c. 1450-1516), was an Italian painter from Viterbo who worked in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He was influenced by both the Umbrian school and the Roman painting tradition.

Pastura's paintings demonstrate the influence of Perugino and the broader Umbrian style, combined with elements from Roman painting. He worked in Viterbo, Orvieto, and Rome, producing altarpieces and frescoes for churches. He assisted in the decoration of the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican under Pinturicchio. His work represents the widespread dissemination of the Umbrian-Roman style throughout the Lazio region during the late Quattrocento.

Antonio del Massaro, called il Pastura, worked in the combined Umbrian-Roman tradition, his style closely following the manner of Perugino and the broader Umbrian school while incorporating elements from Roman ecclesiastical painting. His altarpieces and frescoes in tempera and oil demonstrate the clear compositional organization, harmonious coloring, and sweetly devotional figure types that characterized Perugino's enormously influential style.

His figures possess the gentle, meditative quality that made Umbrian painting the dominant devotional manner in central Italy in the late Quattrocento, set within the carefully constructed landscape backgrounds with their characteristic pale blue horizons and feathery trees. His participation in Pinturicchio's Borgia Apartment decorations demonstrates his ability to integrate into a larger collaborative fresco program, adapting his manner to the more ornate decorative requirements of papal patronage.

Antonio del Massaro represents the broad influence of Perugino's manner through the Lazio region and the smaller cities of central Italy, his career documenting how the Umbrian school's approach to devotional painting spread far beyond Perugia itself. His participation in the decoration of the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican connects him to one of the major papal patronage projects of the late fifteenth century.

His career illustrates the pattern by which Perugino's immensely successful formula — harmonious composition, sweet figure types, luminous landscape — was absorbed and disseminated by a generation of followers who carried it into churches across central Italy. This dissemination was fundamental to establishing Umbrian-Roman painting as the dominant style for Italian devotional art in the years around 1500.