The Story of Perugia

by Margaret Symonds; Lina Duff Gordon

Rooms VI. and VII.

Sala di Bonfigli and Sala di Bernardino di Mariotto.

Before leaving the subject of Bonfigli it will be well to look at some other pieces of his work which are painted in quite a different manner. Amongst these is a Madonna and Child (No. 13). It is a beautiful specimen of the master’s purely pietistic painting.[98] Tradition says that Fra Filippo Lippi ordered this picture. It has suffered terribly, for in old days it was hung in the lavatory of S. Domenico, and as the friars washed their hands they must have splashed the water up against the panels. No. 10, the Adoration of the Magi, is also by Bonfigli. The picture as a whole is perhaps more interesting than beautiful, inasmuch as it is one of the very few religious pictures of the Umbrian School where the portraits of living people have been introduced. Orsini tells us that the Madonna is a portrait of Bonfigli’s sister, the Child a picture of his nephew, and the youngest of the three kings that of his brother. The loveliest point in the picture is the group of angels up in the roof. Bonfigli must, we think, have seen the swallows flitting at springtime in and out of some low breezy barn, and put their movements into angels’ forms. The predella, too, is a perfect gem in itself, notably the panel of the Baptism where the wilderness is painted dark and brown, but the sunrise is full upon the figures of three angels who stand with crowns of roses on their heads and watch the scene among the rocks. There is an Annunciation in the same room by Bonfigli; and it again is chiefly charming because of the treatment of the angels. They come fluttering up behind a group of cypress trees, all in the flush of dawn. But the foreground figure is strange indeed. What did Bonfigli mean when he painted S. Luke and his ox, and planted them there in the midst of the picture so as quite to distract one’s attention from the principal figures of the piece? In the next room (Sala VII.) Bonfigli’s angels can be studied with ease. There are in all eight panels of them, and it is interesting to see how the early painter strove between realism and idealism in the faces. He loved his smiling angels best; what care he took to crown them with pink roses; what baskets too of roses he gave to them to carry! yet to his angels of the Passion he gave no roses, only the symbols of the Crucifixion, its anguish and its thorns.

We have lingered long over the work of a man whose figure is such an attractive one in the Umbrian school. Before passing on to the work of his contemporaries we must mention the name of another artist four of whose pictures are hung in the room of the Bonfigli angels: namely, Bernardino di Mariotto. Bernardino is an interesting figure in the gallery, and one is struck at first sight by the quality of his work, which differs from everything round it. He seems like some strange missing link in the history of the Umbrian and the Roman school; and so little is known about him that up to a quite recent date his work was confused with that, first of much earlier painters, and then of Pinturicchio. His treatment of detail: the Virgin’s gown, the garlands of fruit and flowers, the angels’ wings and the saints’ dresses, is beautiful though his colour is cold and hard. His peculiar use of a very stiff baldachin made people say that he was a master of Raphael. As a matter of fact he lived at S. Severino in the Marches and worked about the years 1502 to 1521.

In the same room there are two big pictures by Bartolomeo Caporali, who was a pupil of Perugino. His great flying angels in No. 12 are like the angels of Bonfigli gone mad, there is something grand in the rush of their wings, and whatever the faults of the somewhat exaggerated composition, it forces one’s immediate attention.

To return to the order of the earlier painters, we come to one or two names which are probably more familiar to most people than that of Bonfigli: these are Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Boccati da Camerino and Niccolò Alunno. There is a fine bit of Alunno’s work in Sala VII. (No 14). It is about the only thing of his which is now attributed to him in Perugia. Such a host of angels singing and playing to God in the heavens, and a charming garden scene round the young Virgin! She kneels very quietly at her desk. Neat pots of flowers stand on the marble wall behind her and three stiff cypress trees against the sky; round a corner of the garden wall two very engaging angels stand gossiping together, their heads thrown back, their mouths a little pouting. In the immediate foreground two patron saints are kneeling to introduce a group of lawyers who commissioned the painting of the banner.

Boccati da Camerino’s work is rare. There is a charming thing of his in Sala VI. (No. 13): a Madonna and a fascinating choir of angels. His largest picture (No. 16) is in the same room and represents the same subject. The Madonna sits enthroned under a heavy pergola of roses, and all around her is a stiff little choir of angels: a most delightful and original conception. The picture was painted for the monks of S. Domenico, and so the emblem of the saint, his dog, had to figure in it. What Boccati was about we cannot judge, but he certainly painted an ermine instead of a dog, and the little Christ receives the strange beast with delight. The predella of the picture is full of stories almost in the style of Carpaccio. Boccati had a rare and charming fancy. In his scene of the procession to Calvary, he shows how a rude soldier attempts to strike the fainting figure of Christ; and one of the horses of the guard, with ears bent back, stoops forward to bite the hand of him who would distress the Saviour.