Room XII.
Sala di Giannicola e di Berto di Giovanni.
From this point forwards the interest of the gallery begins to wane. We have tracked the dawn and seen the sunrise; now we feel the dull warmth of midday, and passing through the weary hours of the afternoon, most fully and amply represented in the work of the two Alfanis, we pass to night through the fevered rooms of the Decadence. Sala XII. is devoted to the work of Perugino’s scholars, but most of it is weak. Still there is a touch of the old sweetness here and there among the figures. Note No. 15 by Giannicola Manni. It has a charm though it is very imitative. The rest of Giannicola’s work in this room is rather dreary. But there is charm, too, in the purely imitative, nay copied work of Berto di Giovanni. Berto was another of Perugino’s scholars. He lived probably towards the end of the fifteenth century and it is evident that he felt a passionate admiration for his fellow student, Raphael. All we can gather of facts about Berto comes to us through his connection with Raphael. In 1516 he contracted to paint, in combination with his hero, a picture for the nuns of Monteluce. Bits of the predella are now in the Pinacoteca. In the flat and almost womanish sketches of Berto one traces his persistent admiration for the greater artist. It is as though an intelligent child had torn the leaves from its mother’s sketch-book and filled in the lines with faithful and laborious colouring. (See Nos. 19 to 26.) But Berto’s charm, such as it is, went all wrong when he tried to paint big subjects. Nos. 16 and 14 are little more than failures.
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To anyone who admires the work of the two Alfani, Domenico and Orazio, a happy hunting-ground exists in the last big rooms of the Pinacoteca. How it came about that one of Perugino’s really lovely frescoes got hung in this part, we cannot tell, but it is certain that the Nativity (No. 31, Room XIII.) is one of the loveliest things that remain of Pietro in the town of Perugia. It is very like our own Nativity in the National Gallery, faint and fair in colour, calm and true in composition, with a peculiar lilac colour of crushed grapes throughout the dresses and the landscape.
It would be impossible to close any account of the school of Perugino without a slight sketch of the two Alfanis whose intense admiration for the genius of painting became a fault, and who, through their very earnestness preserved the corpse from which the life long since had fled. The Alfanis, Domenico the father, and Orazio the son, had money and long life. These two happy gifts they employed in the paths of art; with these two gifts they at length degraded what they really attempted to exalt. Domenico was such a passionate admirer of Raphael that one of his historians declared him to have died in the same year as Sanzio. Mariotti denies this. “However passionate a friend and inseparable a companion,” he urges, “Domenico had not for certain such a crazy folly as to accompany him to the other world.” Domenico far outlived Raphael. In his long life he absorbed the teaching of many schools, and utterly obliterated his own personality in the work of other people. His son Orazio did the same. They went into partnership, started a large school or studio, and there created the innumerable, rather middle-class pictures, which cover the walls of the Pinacoteca. Grazio survived his father about thirty years, and was the first president of the Academy of Perugia founded in 1573.
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One word to close these notes about the painters of the Umbrian school.
Seek out the painters in the places where they painted. Go to Spoleto for the works of Lo Spagna, to Gubbio for the masterpiece of Nelli, to Spello for Pinturicchio, to Foligno for the early men who have not even names. Go in May to Montefalco, when all the green of Umbrian angels’ wings is in the lanes which lead to these. Learn by heart the Umbrian landscape if you wish to really love and understand the spirit of Umbrian art. The Pinacoteca of Perugia serves only as a backbone for the genuine study.[103]
CHAPTER XI
The Museum,[104] and Tomb of the Volumnii
HAVING traced the first Etruscan walls and seen the tomb of the Volumnii, a note of sombre and half melancholy interest will inevitably have been struck upon our mind whilst trying to realise the lives of those mysterious people who created these things and left these dumb indications—dumb, because the language is so dead—upon the country where they lived and died. This note is of course by no means confined to the mind of the passing traveller. It is the people of the place itself who feel it most, and in Perugia, thanks to their efforts, we have, in the museum at the University, a very complete, if only a small collection of the relics of Etruscan civilization as found in the immediate neighbourhood. In a small book written by Signor Lupatelli upon the growth of the museum, we read that the noble families of the place have always loved to trace their earliest ancestors by carefully collecting any sarcophagi or other relics which they found upon their lands. In this way the Museum has been formed, and a crowd of tombs, laid open by the plough or winter rains, have been preserved with all their treasures in them.[105]
The study of the Etruscans is, after all, the study of the dead, and an Etruscan Museum has about it all the mysterious atmosphere of the tomb. What barrier greater, what ocean more profound, than that between ourselves and this dead people! Their tombs, their busts, their playthings and inscriptions seem to chill the very air around them. Ordinary people, not students of archæology, must face this fact quite boldly and come prepared to plunge head foremost into a very chilly atmosphere if they wish to learn about the ancient Etruscans. The present writers are bound to confess, that, on glad spring mornings, they have turned from the sarcophagi and the bronzes and terra-cotta vases in the cases to look with undisguised delight through the windows of the museum and up beyond to the brown roofs of the wicked old mediæval city opposite. The Duomo with all the blood upon its steps, the Piazza with all its passionate and burning history, seemed to them more real, more sympathetic, than the uneventful countenances, the harmless funereal urns, of this quiet race of men, who lived and died over one thousand years before our era.
“Les Tyrènes,” says M. André Lefèvre, “durant leur longue domination sont restés des étrangers, c’est ce qui explique pourquoi leur langue et leurs dieux ont disparu avec leur puissance, et pourquoi nous sommes réduits à fouiller leurs tombeaux pour connaître leur vie. C’est de leurs demeures funéraires que nous exhumons aujourd’hui leurs industries, leurs arts, leurs festins, leurs danses, leurs jeux, leurs pompeuses cérémonies triomphales, et leurs nuptiales, et aussi leur courte philosophie faite de fatalisme et d’insouciance.”
It is probable that when the Rasenae first arrived in central Italy, they were still an almost barbarous nation, and that their arts and civilization were developed later in their northern settlements, in Tuscany and Umbria. They seem to have adopted little from the races who preceded them in Italy, though some say that they learned the art of statuary from these still more mysterious people; but, being, as we know, themselves a sea-faring nation they may have taken their first conceptions of art from the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, and in this way they might easily have come in contact with the art of Egypt and of Carthage. But by far the strongest influence was that of Greece. This they perhaps felt first in Greece itself, and later through their contact with Greek settlers in Italy.
The Etruscans were a receptive people; they easily grasped a new idea, and carried it out with careful precision, though with rounded edges, so to speak. The spirit of the inspiration of pure art is lacking in their work. They were excellent craftsmen, and Rome is said to have learned certain points in the uses of casting metal and in masonry from Etruscan artisans. They were also an agricultural people, who did much towards improving the soil wherever they settled. The Etruscans were a very religious, or at least a superstitious race, full of faith in augury, constantly consulting natural oracles, such as the flight of birds and variations of the atmosphere, and, like the Greeks, they had their household gods or lares. The Medusa’s head is for ever recurring in their monuments and on their house-doors. Having some strong belief in the immortality of the human soul, they crowded their dead with gifts, putting their most elaborate work upon the tombs, and giving to the corpse all the necessaries for a long journey to a distant land, or for a possible reawakening. They had different modes of burial. Usually the body was burned, but sometimes—and we have admirable instances of this in the Perugian Museum—it was simply buried in a stone sarcophagus. Women were respected and held a high position in society. This fact is clearly shown by their prominence upon the tombs, where they sit side by side with their husbands, as they were probably in the habit of doing at their feasts. The toilet was also respected, and the dead took as many pots of balsam to the grave as they took tear-bottles. The richer bodies have a wonderful array of dressing-table nicknacks at their head and feet, and the loveliest and most careful work in the whole museum is that upon the hand-mirrors (see Case 12, Room vi.), which were also probably laid in the tomb of the beloved dead.
The chief interest in this museum of Perugia is the wealth of its inscriptions. The passages are lined with them, and a catalogue or dictionary has been made of them. The Etruscans lived side by side with the Romans and the Greeks, and often we find inscriptions written in both languages upon one tomb; yet, though the two latter peoples were the greatest scholars of the world, the Etruscan language is dead to us for all practical purposes; and the longest Etruscan inscription which is known—the pride of the Perugian Museum—is little better than a blank wall to all who look to it for purposes of study.[106]
The Etruscans lived luxurious lives, but their race ran long upon the soil of Italy. As far as it can be traced, their rule, or at least their occupation, lasted for about twelve centuries. By the beginning of the Christian era they were already dying out.
M. André Lefèvre gives the following final summing up of the influence of the Etruscans upon the greater nation which gradually took their place:—
“Bien que, même aux temps de leur plus grande puissance ils n’aient pu imposer ni leur langue ni leurs dieux à des peuples établis depuis mille ans sur le sol Italien, leur part n’en a pas moins été considérable dans la civilisation Latine. Leur influence a été moindre sur les hommes que sur les choses, sur l’esprit que sur les formes extérieures, cérémonielles et rituelles,—qui, à leur tour, affectent les institutions et les moeurs. Ils ont appris aux Romains à bâtir des maisons et des temples, à ordonner les festins, les processions, les pompes triomphales et les jeux sanglants du cirque. Les meubles, les sièges, les statues, les licteurs, le costume, la bulle d’or des enfants patriciens, sont aussi d’origine Étrusque. Enfin, ils ont ajouté aux superstitions déja si nombreuses des Latins et des Sabins la science, si ce n’est pas profaner un tel mot, la science augurale, élevée au rang d’institution politique, perpétuant ainsi, au sein d’une civilisation avancée, les plus niaises pratiques de la sauvagerie la plus infinie.”
As it would have been impossible in the slight scope of this small book to give any detailed account of the different objects in the Perugian museum, we have thought it wiser to offer the above sketch of the Etruscans themselves, adding only some promiscuous notes about the collections for those who care to read them as they pass through the different rooms. The new Catalogue by Signor Donati, the profound works of Count Conestabile and Signor Vermiglioli, and the delightful chapter in Dennis’ Etruria contain all the information that a genuine student will desire.