Collegio del Cambio, Art museum in Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia, Italy
The Collegio del Cambio is a historic guild hall and museum inside the Palazzo dei Priori, in the center of Perugia. The main room is lined with carved and inlaid wooden seats, while every wall is covered with frescoes painted by Perugino in the early 1500s.
The Collegio del Cambio was founded in 1452 as the official seat of the money-changers and bankers guild of Perugia. Around fifty years later, the guild commissioned Perugino to paint the walls of the main hall, and those paintings have remained in place ever since.
The main hall shows frescoes where figures from ancient Greece and Rome appear alongside Christian virtues, painted in a way that felt natural to educated people of the Renaissance. Visitors today can stand in the same room where guild members once gathered and look at the same walls.
The Collegio del Cambio is inside the Palazzo dei Priori, which sits directly on Perugia's main street and is easy to find on foot. The hall itself is small, so visiting on a weekday morning tends to give you more space to look at the frescoes without a crowd.
Perugino painted his own face into the frescoes on the wall, a detail easy to miss if you are not looking for it. This makes the hall one of the earliest known examples of an artist openly placing a self-portrait inside a commissioned work.
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