( fl 1488; d before 14 Oct 1529). Italian painter. A pupil of Perugino, he was strongly influenced both by his teacher and by Raphael and his circle. He is first mentioned in documents in 1488 and again in 1495 when, with Sinibaldo Ibi, Eusebio da San Giorgio, Lattanzio di Giovanni (d 1534) and Lodovico di Angelo (1481–1522), he took a year’s lease on a workshop near the Porta Eburnea, Perugia. In 1499 he was appointed treasurer of the painters’ guild of Perugia, an office he again held in 1504, 1514 and 1522. In 1502, with Eusebio da San Giorgio and Nicolò da Cesena, he received payment for frescoes (destr.), which decorated the presbytery of Perugia Cathedral. In 1504 he painted a fresco of the Virgin and Two Saints in a Landscape in the Palazzo Conestabili, Perugia. A Virgin and Child with Saints painted in 1506–7 for S Franceso, Montone, strongly reveals the influence of Perugino, to whom it was mistakenly attributed by Vasari. Between 1508 and 1510 he and Sinibaldo Ibi executed a Virgin and Child with Saints for S Agostino, Perugia. In the following years Berto executed several minor commissions in Perugia. In 1516, on renewal of the contract between Raphael, himself and the monastery of Monteluce, Berto was engaged to work on the altar panels, which were to be completed by Raphael. The resulting predella panels, executed before 1525, depict four scenes from the Life of the Virgin (Perugia, G.N. Umbria). The strong colour contrasts set against a dark ground and the mannered character of the figures reveal his stylistic dependence on Giulio Romano and Giovanni Francesco Penni, who were responsible for completing the main panel after the death of Raphael in 1520. Berto’s last recorded work was a plague banner, executed in 1526 in a retardataire style, for Perugia Cathedral.

• Berto di Giovanni (di Marco)
  • Ibi, Sinibaldo