S. Agostino.
Many roads meet in the Piazza Grimani, and joining as it were together, pass back to the heart of the town through the arch of Augustus. The whole of the Borgo S. Angelo, which spreads away to the north of the piazza, though enclosed by very early walls, is not part of the first city of Perugia, and is indeed a little city of its own with one main street, the Via Longara, and houses closely packed on either side.[74] To the right as one passes up it is the church of S. Agostino, with its wonderful choir—one of those choirs which, by its exquisite variety of design and transformation of the wood to beasts, delights and fascinates one.
The choir was made in 1502, and, as Mariotti, who describes it at length, remarks, it is “indeed worthy of praise.” Perugino himself supplied the designs, which were carried out by his Florentine friend Baccio d’Agnolo, and Perugino saw that the payment of the work was good: 1120 florins down at the end of the year when the work was done.[75]
S. Agostino, like other churches of the town, has long since been despoiled of its best treasures. We read a long list of its early pictures; the crowning glory of these, the large and many-sided altar-piece by Perugino, was pulled to bits and scattered during the Napoleonic raids. The history of this great altar-piece has been traced with extraordinary precision, and as it throws some light on the ways of the painter we give a sketch of it here. It seems that in the autumn of 1502 the indefatigable Pietro signed a contract in which he promised to paint his “Sposalizio” for the Duomo, three other smaller pictures, designs for the stalls of S. Agostino, and finally an immense two-sided altar-piece for that same church. As may easily be imagined the
carrying out of this colossal contract was no light matter, and it dragged on for years during which time Perugino did not hesitate to embark on several other works; and, not at all abashed by his own lack of faith in promises, we find him writing to the friars of S. Agostino from Pieve di Castello, where he was for the time engaged on other work, begging them in a large round hand and most marvellous spelling, to give some corn to one of his protégés, bearer of the letter (see Pinacoteca). The letter is dated March 30, 1512. The next we hear of the picture is in the autumn of 1521 when there is a question about payment which proves that the work was finished. It is not an easy matter to reconstruct this picture, but we have seen the plan of it in a very early manuscript which shows a grand pile of frame and canvasses much in the style of Pinturicchio’s altar-piece in the Pinacoteca. Of all its many parts Perugia has only kept a few of the saints, the Baptism, the Nativity and the Pietà(?). We read of scattered fragments in such different towns as Grenoble, Toulouse, Lyons, and Nantes. The Madonna herself, we hear, was pierced by a German ball at Strasburg.
There is in a side chapel of S. Agostino a rather beautiful old fresco, probably by some scholar of Perugino, of a Madonna and some saints with a white rabbit in the foreground. Looking one day at the picture we wondered vaguely why the rabbit had been painted there: “Ma, per bellezza,” hazarded the small son of the sacristan with the delightful intuition peculiar to the children of his nation. No doubt he was perfectly right. Another good fresco by Perugino or his scholars may be found, strangely enough, in the back passage of a baker’s shop a little farther up the Via Longara; but before leaving the church of S. Agostino it would be well to look at the splendid meeting-room of the Confraternità next door to it. This room, like that at S. Francesco, is a magnificent specimen of rather heavy and sumptuous Renaissance wood-carving.