S. Martino.
There are several ways of returning to the Duomo from the Piazza della Giustizia. One of the pleasantest runs through a bit of cultivated land outside the town walls: the Via di San Francesco, and, joining the Via della Conca, passes up under the Arco d’Augusta and back by the Via Vecchia. But another way, which few could find who did not know of it, winds back into the heart of the old town, actually crossing the Etruscan walls in one place, and comes out opposite the Canonica, having passed the little old church of S. Martino.
S. Martino is so old, and so much overshadowed by the big palace opposite, it is sunk so low upon the street, that passing by it hurriedly one scarcely recognises it as a church at all.[84] The high altar has a very beautiful altar-piece by Giannicola Manni—one of the loveliest bits of Umbrian colouring that we remember in Perugia, and there is a rather faulty fresco by some scholar of Perugino on the west wall, redeemed by that subtle and sweet charm peculiar to the work of the master. The little church is guarded by a true friend, who not only honours its pictures, but has even copied them with faithful care, and the whole place is filled with something of the quiet and religious fervour which lingers only after centuries of prayer and incense, and which is lacking in so many of the more frequented churches of the town.
CHAPTER IX
Pietro Perugino and the Cambio[85]
THE name of Perugia is naturally connected with that of Pietro Vannucci detto il Perugino, or, as he preferred to sign himself, Petrus de Castro Plebis, who stamped the peculiar personality of his painting upon a whole school of Renaissance Italian art. Vannucci was by no means the first artist of the Umbrian school, but he was the man who brought it into general notice, and it was in the city of Perugia that he lived and worked, and had his school of painting.
The best of Perugino’s work, however, with the exception of his frescoes in the Cambio, is not to be found in his native town. The indefatigable Napoleon had a profound admiration for Pietro’s altar-pieces. He sought them out, he insisted on getting every inch of them, down to their smallest predellas, and the splendid pictures of S. Pietro, S. Lorenzo, and S. Agostino went over the Alps to swell his galleries in the Tuileries. The frescoes of the Cambio could not go, and they at least remain exactly as the master painted them. To understand the man Pietro as well as the artist, we must study in the Cambio, for there his portrait hangs face to face with a whole set of his frescoes, and the contrast of the painter’s face and the faces he invariably gave to his saints is almost as strange as that between the Umbrian saints and the history of the times in which they lived and worked.
To understand the painters of Perugia one must understand the period in which they were produced. One wonders whether Vasari reckoned at all with this when he wrote his life of Perugino. The Florentine was not particularly just to Umbrian painters in general, and of Pietro Vannucci he paints a very unsympathetic portrait. He accuses him of two great faults: avarice and irreligion, and these have become so inevitably connected with Pietro’s name that it is not easy to dispute them. Yet, if not absolutely false, the facts have been grossly exaggerated. Concerning the first—avarice—Vasari maintains that Pietro painted exclusively for the sake of gain, and never for that of art or faith. This accusation has been disproved by later writers in so far as the early life of Perugino is concerned. We hear, for instance, that he painted several banners for his native city in the time of plague and war, that he asked no money for them, and when the time of need was past he took them back and kept them in his studio. Also, merely as an amusing anecdote, Vasari himself tells us that Pietro could open his purse for the woman he loved, and dress her in the fairest and the costliest clothes, setting the pins and folds himself upon her headgear. In the latter part of his life, which was not without some shadow, he did paint for money, allowing soulless pictures to pass from his studio to the altars of believing monks and ladies; but his best work belongs to his earliest period, and there is no reason to believe that it was uninspired save by the inspiration of gold.
Concerning the second accusation—lack of faith—we have dealt with it at the end of Pietro’s life, and we can only add here that the man must have been of super-human gentleness who could live through the scenes that Vannucci lived through, and maintain the faith of childhood.
The portrait in the Cambio is a stumbling block. The expression is heavy and unspiritual. This fact jars, and we resent it. (See frontispiece.)
But whatever Pietro’s appearance, whatever his personal character may have been, he did two things: he left behind him an enduring mark in the history of art, and he gave the soul to that considerable school of painting from which young Raphael went forth into the wondering world, together with a host of other painters whose tendency was entirely in the direction of the spiritual and purifying elements in human life.
* * * * * * * *
Away to the southwest of Perugia, above the lakes of Trasimene and Chiusi, with a wide view southwards towards Rome, and northwards to Cortona, is the little Umbrian hill-town of Città della Pieve. It is so deeply buried in its oak woods that one can barely see it from the hills and plains around it. The town is very old and very sleepy, built of red bricks with hardly any stones, and scarcely any buildings of importance. The streets seem fallen dead asleep. “Why do you come here? The place is dead. Nothing ever happens in our city,” said the melancholy daughter of the landlord, and the girl, by her unconscious words, explained the very reason of our visit.
Nothing ever happens in Città della Pieve. The town has fallen on sleep in its delightful landscape—on sleep as silent and profound as that of all the fossil shells in the banks along the roads which lead to it. But the place is strangely and marvellously beautiful; it holds the very essence of that intense religious charm peculiar to the landscapes of Umbria, and to the painters who have painted them; without exaggeration, we may say that the city looks to-day just exactly as it looked over four hundred years ago, at the time when, to the lovers of art, its history began and ended.[86]
Pietro Vannucci de Castro Plebis detto il Perugino, was born at Città della Pieve in the year 1446. His parents were very poor, but they were of a good family and position. There were many children, and life was a struggle for bread in the small boy’s home. When he was about eight, his father, Christoforo Vannucci, decided to educate him as a painter, and so he brought him to the city of Perugia, and there, as Vasari says, “this child, who had been reared in penury and want, was given as a shop drudge to a painter who was not particularly distinguished in his calling, but who held the art in great veneration, and highly honoured the men who excelled therein.” The painter was probably Bonfigli, one of the most delightful artists of the Umbrian school, but Pietro must have gathered instruction from other sources too, from Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and Piero della Francesca, who we know were painting at that time. Maybe the boy met them at their work in churches, maybe he even travelled with them as a sort of journeyman. But it was probably Bonfigli who early inspired him with an ambitious desire to spread his wings in higher spheres of art than the little Umbrian town afforded him, and who gave him the worldly-wise advice retailed to us at some length by Vasari: Perugino must go to Florence,
“for the air of that city generates a desire for glory and honour, and gives a natural quickness to the perceptions of men. Yet it is true that when a man has acquired sufficient for his purposes in Florence, if he wishes to effect more than merely to live from day to day, as do the beasts that perish, and desires to become rich, he must depart from its boundaries and seek another market for the excellence of his works and for the reputation conferred on artists by that city. For the city of Florence treats her painters as Time treats her works, which, having perfected, he destroys, and by little and little gradually consumes.”
Pietro listened to these naïve counsels; he drank them in and he followed them out to the letter. When quite a young man he started across the hills to Florence. He probably travelled as a journeyman, begging or earning his bread along the way. He reached Florence, entered the studio of Andrea Verrocchio, buried himself in a passionate study of his art, and, barely ten years after the date when, as an almost unknown artist, he had entered Florence with the secret of his genius in his soul, he left it again to go to Rome and paint a portion of the Sistine Chapel at the command of the reigning pope. Pietro studied in good schools and in excellently good society. In Florence he probably met with men like Botticelli, Credi, and certainly Leonardo da Vinci. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, is said to have written the following lines about the two young painters:
“Due giovan par d’etate e par d’amore
Lionardo da Vinci, e ’l Perusino
Pier della Pieve, ch’è un divin pittore.”
Divine in truth were the two young men, for they were to be the fathers of the Lombard and the Umbrian schools of painting.
Perugino’s earliest commissions for pictures were received in Florence, but nearly all the work of that period is lost. We cannot exaggerate the loss, but it is useless now to dwell on it and to describe the vanished frescoes of the Gesuati convent. Pietro was
called to Rome about the year 1483. There he painted several pictures on the walls of the Sistine chapel. Only two of them remain, and the figures of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment have long obliterated the sweet-faced Umbrian saints and landscapes which used to cover the east wall.[87] Having spent a little time in Rome, Perugino returned to his native land, and the best of his paintings belong to that period—namely to the years 1490-1502.
This is no place in which to describe the works of Perugino’s prime. The world knows them and the capitals of Europe possess them, but from the city of Perugia, for which some of the very best were painted, they have been taken away by “quel stupendo ladro—Napoleone Bonaparte.”[88] Perugino’s fame spread like wildfire over the cities of Italy. “This maestro Pietro,” says a very old chronicler, “was distinguished (singolare) in his art throughout the universal world.” So intense was his fame and popularity, and his work in such demand, that it was impossible for him, for one single man, to supply all the work which men demanded of him. We should not therefore feel surprised at the number of second-rate pictures, planned by the master and carried out by his scholars, which have come down to us bearing his name.
From the period of his prime, Perugino perhaps went wrong—that is to say, he realised his own charms, specified, docketted them, stereotyped the smile of his saints and set his scholars working, so to speak, on the reproduction of the labels he himself had painted. His personality extended itself into a school, where, at times, it became mere caricature. Other stars had risen on the horizon, great and shining; some of them straight from the master’s own workshop, some from other cities. There is a pitiful story told of the jealousy of the old Umbrian master for the growing fame of Michelangelo. It ended in a lawsuit from which Pietro withdrew his claims; but the tale may be unfounded, and we know that Vannucci praised the David when called to pass a judgment on it, we also know that he named one of his own children after the Tuscan sculptor.
But if we can recognise the later weakness of Perugino, the men who lived in his days and who openly declared him to be the master of masters never apparently recognised it. They seem to have worshipped his decadence as they had worshipped his dawn. They paid large sums for the feeble saints which rose like ghosts beneath his brush. They desired no better man to save them in the time of plague and bloodshed by the creation of a S. Sebastian which they might carry in procession, or a Madonna that they might kneel to. And truly to the end an ineffable sweetness, a religious amiability, is the undercurrent of the master’s painting.
Pietro Vannucci died of the plague in the year 1523 at Fontignano, a small village near Perugia, where he had been called to paint a S. Sebastian in the time of pestilence. He was hurried into some desolate grave under an oak by the wayside, and he died, as they say, without faith of immortality, denying to the last that Saviour, whose face and figure, whose Mother and surroundings, he, of all men on earth, had striven through life to idealize.
So writes Vasari, but on this accusation we would pause. There may have been some sickness in Pietro’s soul, we feel and see it in his work and portrait; but he had lived in terrible times and seen much evil and striven to paint much good. The fact that he was buried in unconsecrated ground proves literally nothing, for an old chronicler, describing the wretchedness of the times, combined with the terrors of the plague, tells us, “that such was the state of affairs, that the dead were paid as little attention to in those times as in our day we might give to goats or sheep; and that especially in the country where no one attended to anything, all died, almost without exception, not like men but almost like beasts; and as the consecrated ground did not suffice for burial they put the bodies into ditches, covering them up with a very little earth.” Furthermore, “it was prohibited to visit the sick, and to attend the funerals of the dead.” This being the case, how was it possible to find the corpse of one old man in order to lay it in consecrated ground? Pietro’s sons tried hard to find it. We read of them: of Giambatisto, Francesco and Michaelangelo, searching diligently but in vain for their father’s bones, that they might lay them in the Church of S. Agostino.[89]
Mariotti the chronicler of Perugino, whose loving and infinitely careful search has soothed, if it could not obliterate Vasari’s spiteful words, ends his notes on Perugino with the following quotation from a Latin poet:—
“Se pictus moreris, non moriturus obis.”
* * * * * * * *
It was just at the end of the period of Pietro’s prime, namely, about the years 1499 to 1507, that he was commissioned to paint the walls of the Cambio. It is interesting to remember that at this time Perugino was in correspondence with the monks of Orvieto, who wished him to paint the frescoes in their Duomo. He had long dallied with his answer, he had certain other large works on hand, but when his fellow-citizens sent in their request that he should undertake this very considerable work for them he did not hesitate; he threw over his previous engagement, which, as we know, was magnificently taken up by Signorelli, and he at once set to work upon the walls of the Cambio.
Perugino was perhaps out of his element in this new undertaking. He had no choice of subjects, for they had been selected for him by the members of the Guild, who throughout show a most naïve interest and concern in the decoration of their rooms. These men were determined to secure the very best work they could; their seats, their panels, their doors were of the finest wood, worked by the most skilful carpenters and artists of the day. They were not wise in literature themselves, so they applied to the best scholar of their city, Francesco Matarazzo, for instructions, and it was he who most probably arranged the curious mixture of classic subjects and inscriptions which Perugino, with a certain child-like and ingenuous persistence, painted as he had painted all the familiar subjects of the Bible. For the ceiling of the audience chamber, which deals entirely with mythological figures, he may have consulted certain old illustrated missals in the Perugian archives; one of these, a Cicero (unhappily stolen from the library some years ago), very probably suggested some of the figures and beasts of the Zodiac which decorate the ceiling.
The impression made upon one by the painting in the Cambio is very calm and pleasing. The whole is a harmony—a harmony of subjects sacred and profane such as the classic-loving minds of scholars in the days of the Renaissance delighted to create, and give to one of their purely religious artists to carry out successfully. The left wall is covered by two frescoes—two lines of figures—eight Romans and four Greeks. Behind these figures stretches the fair, calm, Umbrian landscape, dear to the heart of the Umbrian painter. In the sky above them are four female figures, Prudence and Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, and below them small angels hold the long inscription which is written over every group. Very soft and tender is Perugino’s conception of Roman Emperors and Greek philosophers. They have the hands of women, their faces are sweet like the faces of saints. They look a little sad, and very gentle as they bend towards each other—not one of these men could have proved a ruler of nations. What did Perugino mean when he painted in the second group this visionary host of warriors? Surely he dreamed of some fair Umbrian girls that he had met in May along the lanes, but not of heroes. These youths, with their wonderful headgear and their long, limp bodies would have fallen as field flowers fall before the scythe or even a summer shower. That they are fair no one denies, and in the face of Cincinnatus there is a mysterious sweetness which disarms our criticism; but they are merely spiritual or imaginative portraits of the men whose names are carefully inscribed beneath them. The opposite wall is covered by a group of Prophets and of Sibyls—a combination which was not uncommon in later Christian art. To the left Isaiah, Moses, Daniel, David and Jeremiah, and opposite them the Persian, Cumaean, Lybian, Tyburtine and Delphic sibyls. Perugino crowned this most singular mixture of pagan and of Hebrew figures with a portrait of God the Father in glory. Many of the faces in this group are very beautiful, notably that of Daniel, which is said to be a portrait of young Raphael, and is a truly exquisite thing. Jeremiah is represented as a young and very melancholy man, and his face is said to be a portrait of Pinturicchio, but if this fact is true the likeness is much idealized.
In the two frescoes at the end of the room, namely, the Nativity and the Transfiguration, Pietro was in his old and dearer element. The former of these is a beautiful bit of his best religious work, but it has been terribly damaged by smoke, as the lamp of the Cambio used to hang beneath it.
There is some dispute as to whether Pietro worked alone at these frescoes. It appears almost certain that he did do so, with the exception, perhaps, of one of his scholars, l’Ingegno, who is said to have painted the face of Christ in the Transfiguration.[90] The ceiling, where the planets are painted in medallions, is perhaps the work of his school, although the drawings were entirely supplied by Perugino. Pinturicchio is said to have helped in the painting, and Raphael doubtless watched it with delight, and from it drew suggestions which he carried later to the Vatican. Delightful animals, dragons, and different birds pull the chariots of the various planets. The arabesques are infinitely varied, and form a study in themselves. Small boys and cherubs ride astride of dragons or of goats, and strange fantastic animals turn and twist themselves through flower stalks and bowls of fruits and flowers. Squirrels, peacocks, snakes, and many other known and unknown creatures, cover the arches like enamelled gems.
It is curious to pass from Perugino’s frescoes in the audience chamber of the Cambio to those of his pupil Giannicola Manni in the chapel of the same guild. Manni’s work is very rare, and indeed it is barely seen outside Perugia.[91] He was a scholar of Perugino, and in his earlier years he followed in the steps of his master, but in later life he went to Florence and there acquired a love for the style of Andrea del Sarto. The influence of the two distinct schools of painting is strongly marked in the chapel of the Cambio, the ceiling of which was painted early in Manni’s life, the walls after his return from Florence. Manni is a genial and attractive painter. He paints exactly as he pleases, regardless of religion or of history, and in his series of scenes from the life of S. John he gives us a set of luxurious human beings leading a very human cinque-cento life. The colour is bright, the figures portraits of the time. The ladies are very decolletées, fat, and dressed in comfortable gowns of the most beautiful stuffs and the simplest cut. One lady in the Nativity is particularly attractive. She wears a gorgeous gown of red; her fluffy yellow hair is neatly gathered in a net, embossed with bobs of the purest gold. S. Elizabeth, too, may be envied the splendour of her bed, and the looping of its heavy damask curtains. There is a sense of luxury, a sort of wanton abundance which is almost Venetian, throughout Manni’s frescoes of the life of S. John. In the banquet scene, a dog and cat are preparing for a playful battle in the foreground of the picture. Had the Umbrian painter seen some canvasses of Veronese? Certainly he had wandered far afield from the early teaching which shows so clear upon the ceiling. He died in 1544, and most of his work, which we know to have consisted chiefly of banners, is lost to us, lost too, the painting of the city clock which Mariotti records for us with such minute precision.[92]
On leaving the Cambio it would be well to look in at the Magistrate’s audience chamber which opens on to the Corso two doors further on. It is a magnificent piece of Renaissance woodwork where every inch is exquisitely carved and finished. Perugia is rich in rare and lovely carvings, but nowhere more than in this single hall.
CHAPTER X
The Pinacoteca[93]
“ ...Parmi de pareilles mœurs, les âmes se maintiennent vivantes, et le sol est tout labouré pour faire germer les arts.
Mais quel contraste entre ces arts et ces mœurs!”
H. Taine, “Pérouse et Assise,” Voyage en Italie.
THERE is perhaps no gallery in Europe as single-minded—as devoted to one set of men—as the gallery at Perugia. In passing through its separate rooms one feels none of that painful sense of clash and strain produced by a mixture of different schools, which haunts one in so many collections of statues or of pictures; and the most tired and indifferent traveller will feel something soothed and softened in his brain before he turns his back upon the quiet sacred pictures of the Umbrian masters.
In no land perhaps, and in no school of art, was the feeling of the painters more purely and more absolutely religious than in the land of Umbria. The saints were painted for places where saints were worshipped; the Christs have the love of the Father in their faces; the Marys are Mothers of pity and of grace; the bishops have renounced the ways of earth—their faces are calm and grey beneath their mitres. And the Umbrian angels are crowned with roses, but they are the roses of Paradise, and not the flowers of earth and of her banquets. Think of the galleries of Venice, of Bonifazio’s Dives, and the glorious women of Titian; think of the Roman collections, of Bologna and Guercino; nay, even think of the later art of Florence, and then come back to these calm Umbrian masters. The gap is wide; the one is full of the passion and splendour of earth, the other of the sentiment of heaven.
In M. Rio’s chapters on the Umbrian school (l’Art Chrétien, vol. ii.), he dwells at length on the purely spiritual tendency of the Umbrian school, and to enforce this he points out two of its most remarkable characteristics; firstly he remarks that the Umbrian painters rarely painted portraits, and secondly, he gives an account of one of their chief products, namely, the painting of the gonfalone or banner.
We have seen in the history how the inhabitants of Perugia, driven to desperation by their own wickedness, would take fits of the most passionate religious revolt, and, casting aside the vanities of the flesh, half kill themselves with cords and stripes and lamentations. This excess of repentance took different forms. Sometimes, as we know, it resulted in an appeal to the saints through wild, mad litanies; at others in an appeal to Christ’s mercy through art; and it was at such times that the Umbrian school, beginning with Bonfigli and ending in works like Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Baroccio’s much later designs, painted the gonfalone, a style of picture which is very typical of Umbria, and which should be looked at with a knowledge of the events from which it first originated. These banners were carried about the city, the priests walking in front, the populace behind, a wail and shriek of lamentation falling on the air as the procession passed. Sometimes, as in the banner of Bonfigli at S. Fiorenzo, a poem of supplication to God would be painted, upheld by angels, on the banner itself, with passionate words of prayer upon it. It is difficult to render into English the palpitating style of the original verses, but we quote some passages to illustrate the sentiment which inspired the painting of the gonfalone of S. Fiorenzo (the date of the banner is about 1476):
“Oh, most obstinate and wicked people—cruel, proud, and full of all iniquity, who hast placed thy faith and thy desires on things which are full of a mortal misery, I, the angel of Heaven, am sent unto you from God to tell you that he will put an end to all your wounds and weeping, your ruin and your curse, through the mediation of Mary.... Turn, turn your eyes, most miserable mortals, to the great examples of the past and present, to the utter miseries and heavy evils which Heaven sends to you because of all your sins: your homicide and your adultery, your avarice and luxury.... O, miserable beings, the justice of heaven works not in a hurry, but it punishes always, even as men deserve.... Nineveh was a city florid and magnificent, and Babylon was likewise, but now they are as nothing; and Sodom and Gomorrah, behold them now—a morass of sulphur and of fetid waters.... Oh, therefore be grateful, and acknowledge the benefits and graces of Our Saviour, and let your souls burn hotly with the fire of faith and charity, of hope and faithful love.... But, and if you should again grow slothful and unwilling to renounce your errors, I foretell a second judgment upon you, and I reckon that it will prove more terrible, more cruel than the first....”
The gonfalone on which this menacing appeal of the angel of God is painted is by Bonfigli, and was made at the time of a terrible pestilence which raged through Perugia at the end of the fifteenth century.
In Umbria therefore, more than in most countries, the history of her art should be studied side by side with the history of the times in which it was produced, for the one was, as it were, the spiritual escape or reaction from the other. The art of Umbria was perhaps only another form of that spirit which produced the teaching of S. Francis. The first pictures of Perugia are full of man’s best prayers, the earliest of them bear his stripes, in very few can we detect his wantonness or humour; and when we say that the later ones are imbued with man’s weakness, or at least his sentimentality, we make a most apparent platitude. It is sufficient in this place to note that whatever the final faults of the school, it originated in a purpose that was pure—the purpose of men who strove to represent the very opposite of all that fury, blood, and passion peculiar to the time and place in which they lived and painted.
To most people, therefore, who once have grasped these facts, there will be something sad, nay, even offensive, in the Pinacoteca at Perugia. Why, and for whom, were these purely religious paintings torn from their niches in the quiet churches, and hung up, side by side, in a glare of light on the walls of a gallery? How pale, and how sad they look, after all, the saints and the Marys, the angels and the holy Child, here on the bare grey walls. The thing has been said a hundred times before, but a friend at Perugia said it to us in a way we have never forgotten. He was a priest, and he loved his church. We were discussing together the present system of local picture galleries. His eyes grew dark. “Yes,” he said, “it is as though they would tear a child from the breasts of its mother. The mother withers and dies, and the child dies too, without her care in the wilderness where they laid it.”
It is the student of art who profits by the present arrangement, for the pictures at Perugia are not difficult to find. With the exception of the Duomo and S. Pietro, most of the churches have been ransacked, and their canvasses and panels neatly stored in perfect order of dates and names on the walls of the Pinacoteca, and it is an easy matter, even in a quiet morning’s stroll, to follow here the rise and fall of Umbrian art. In the limited space before us it will not be possible to give anything but a skeleton sketch of the school of Perugino. Larger works contain abundant store of facts about this particular centre of Italian art; but if one only shuts one’s eyes and dreams of it, the three great names start up before one: Pietro Vannucci, Raphael, and Pinturicchio. Close upon these follow other names; some, and these perhaps the fairest and most charming, rise like the dawn behind them: Ottaviano Nelli, Bonfigli, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. The pupils follow after Manni, Lo Spagna, Eusebio di S. Giorgio, l’Ingegno, Sinibaldo Ibi, Tiberio d’Assisi and a host of others, who die at last, feeble, but not utterly degraded, in the works of the two Alfanis.
An easy-going historian of Perugia summed up the earliest stages of her art in the following sentence: “I have not been able to discover that Perugia had any painters before the time of Bonfigli, but even if she had them, they will not have been worthy of mention.” The assertion was sweeping, and later writers have taken pains to contradict it, but for those who have only time for a superficial and general study of Perugian pictures it yet holds a good deal of truth. No great original work (with the exception of the missal workers, in which style of art Perugia is very rich) is left to us from the hand of a Perugian artist before the time of Bonfigli, and the early history of her art may be said to have been a great deal that of outside influences, for from very early times the best and greatest masters appear, like foreign tribes before them, to have climbed the hill and left some subtle marks upon her churches and her palaces.[94]
As the School of Siena died, that of Umbria awoke to life. Close upon the heels of Taddeo Bartoli, those men followed who were born to precede the School of Perugino. Before them there were around Perugia only phantoms: stiff saints on panels and on parchment, without dates, ghosts of unattained, though dimly felt, ideals—a scattered flock of “primitives,” left here and there on chapel walls or psalters. Then gradually, all through Umbria and her border lands, in a steady circle of glory, like the stars on a summer night, the lights arose and burned. At Gubbio, Camerino, Foligno, Gualdo, Fabriano, and Urbino we trace their steady progress through the work of men like Nelli, Piero della Francesca, Gentile da Fabriano, Niccolò Alunno, and many others. And as these stars arose great comets travelled through them—Giotto, Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Filippo Lippi, and others, till the whole sky was full. Then from the centre, straight from the hill of Città della Pieve—there rose Pietro Perugino, and to his school came one with the halo of pure art upon his forehead,—Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.
The following notes on the Pinacoteca and its pictures may be of use to anyone who requires a few more details than a guide-book can supply. They pretend to be nothing like a serious criticism, for the history of art is long and the books about it full; in most of them the art of Umbria is freely treated. We have gleaned our notes about the painters of Perugia from such sources as Vasari (who, however, is often prejudiced), Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and several local works. Any personal gossip has been drawn from the ever delightful works of Mariotti, whose words, if they be now and then a little antiquated, are as trustworthy as those of a faithful student’s only can be. We have dealt chiefly with the work of the Umbrian painters, and indeed, with the exception of Fra Angelico’s panels and those of some of the Sienese masters, there is little else to study in this small and charming gallery.
The Umbrian School followed close upon that of Siena, and the Gallery of Perugia has some fine bits of Sienese work, notably some panels by Taddeo Bartoli (1363-1422) in Sala IV. This room has some other good panels of early masters—of masters who probably influenced the Perugians, but whose names are lost to us.[95]