Sala II.
Cappella di Bonfigli
(formerly the chapel of the Magistrates’ Guild).
Mariotti gives a long and humorous account of the contract between Bonfigli and the magistrates about the painting of their chapel. Undertaken in 1454 the work was still unfinished at the time of the painter’s death in 1496, and Mariotti is unable to discover any sufficient reason for such undignified delay. “I do not easily think ill of anyone,” he writes, “and least of all of painters, but certainly in those years we have no record even of any influenza raging in the city of Perugia.” When the chapel was half painted, Fra Filippo Lippi was called in to judge about its excellence. He found the pictures good, and voted a sum of four hundred florins in payment to Bonfigli, who once more, and with infinite slowness, went to work upon them. Only the skeleton of this work remains. At the end of the last century, Mariotti thus bewails it: “But the pictures of Bonfigli—oh, my God—how have they been ravaged by the little care bestowed upon them, how devastated by the course of time.” Half ruined by a form of restoration which perhaps is worse than none, ill-lighted, and without their former colour, the frescoes yet remain a delightful and engaging study. They represent the lives of the two bishops, St Louis of Toulouse, and S. Ercolano, patron saints of Perugia. To the right as you enter, and in a dark corner by the window is the Consecration of S. Louis; next to it the miracle of the fish performed by that Saint. This picture is admirably preserved. The landscape is one of those half real and half fantastic follies of a wise man which always charm one. Bonfigli knew that he must paint a town by the seashore; he painted the sea, but he put his own fair Umbrian city straight down upon its shores. There stands the church of S. Domenico with its celebrated windows, and up behind it, tier on tier, there rise the towers and the brown roofs of the city that we read about, the Perugia of the middle ages, against a dark blue sky. The miracle is a naïve one. A merchant lost his bag of gold during a storm at sea. He prayed to S. Louis to reveal to him what had become of it. S. Louis appeared in heaven and showed that a certain large fish had swallowed the purse. The fish was caught, cut open, and inside it was the merchant’s bag of gold. We see the fisherman toiling up from his boat with the heavy fish upon his shoulders, and then we see the monks cutting open the fish, and the merchant and his wife receiving their money. So realistically is the scene presented, that we even see the blood of the fish upon the bag.
The next picture has been terribly damaged, and it is difficult to understand the subject; but a learned gentleman of Perugia, to whom we are indebted for various most ingenious suggestions, fancies that it is simply the representation of some miracle of healing performed by the Saint in Rome; certainly Bonfigli has striven to combine in his background a marvellous mixture of Roman and Etruscan architecture, the arch of Constantine mingling with Porta Susanna and the Colosseum!
The following fresco is perhaps the most delightful of the series. It represents the burial of the Bishop of Toulouse. Now S. Louis is known to have died in his father’s castle of Brignolles in Provence at the early age of twenty-four, but all this was of very secondary importance to the ingenuous Bonfigli. It was sufficient for him to know that a dead Bishop had to be painted. He selected the architecture that he loved best—his own Perugian church of S. Pietro—he sliced it in half so that all might look inside it, and on a bier in the centre of the aisle he laid the corpse of a quite middle-aged Bishop. With infinite care and faithful precision he copied the lines of his church. The true basilica is here, not touched at all by decoration. There was no choir in those days; a dark blue sky looks in at the windows, the roof is bare with all its rafters showing. But the central figure is out of all proportion. The feet and the head of S. Louis of Toulouse almost touch the columns in the aisle. His robe, with the golden fleur de lis, is neatly folded round him, his mitre glistens in the light; his face is grey and calm, and full of dignity and of repose. Bonfigli had a sense of humour and could not refrain from a touch of caricature. It is impossible to look at the group of monks and prelates round S. Louis, and not to feel at once convinced of this. A fat and pompous Bishop, in golden cope and mitre, is saying the mass for the dead. His large red book is supported by the head of a kneeling friar, and the very thumbs of this friar express his disgust and discomfort. To the left of the Bishop a group of roaring monks take up his words and repeat them in dolorous voices. Only to look at their faces one knows that their litany is absolutely out of tune. At the head of the Saint another priest is reading in a book, his acolytes swing incense, one holds the Bishop’s staff. The rest of the church is filled with quiet groups of men and women; and the most charming figure of the whole is that of a young man in a red gown with a shock of yellow curls, who kneels, lost in prayer, at the knees of the dead Saint, his back turned to us.
The next picture represents the siege of Perugia by Totila. No doubt this siege—that most memorable event in the annals of Perugia—was rather a chaos to the mind of Bonfigli as it is to many people nowadays; but the following history, taken from old chronicles, will explain the whole fantastic pageant. It will be remembered that Totila besieged Perugia in 549, and that the little town held out valiantly, but finally fell into the power of the Goths. During a terrible siege the Bishop of Perugia, S. Ercolano, attempted certain childlike and vain subterfuges of war, which unhappily ended in failure and in his own martyrdom. Ciatti, in his somewhat weariful and dreamy style, records the events of the siege as follows:—
“It is said that the saintly Bishop S. Ercolano, receiving much heavenly aid and holy counsels, and perhaps led by God, turned his soul to an act of human prudence. It happened that the city was reduced to extreme misery by reason of the scarcity of victuals, so that the citizens decided to surrender or to die fighting. S. Ercolano counselled them to bring him any grain which should still be found in the granaries, and they, knowing his great sanctity, obeyed and brought to him, after most diligent search, one small measure of corn. Then the Saint took the sole surviving lamb” (Bonfigli in his frescoes has painted an ox) “and, to the wonder and silent indignation of the people, he gave it to eat of the grain; it ate abundantly and the Bishop then threw the lamb with great force down from the ramparts, when, by reason of its great fulness and the height of its fall, the innocent beast was at once killed. When the captains of the enemy beheld this thing they were angry, saying: ‘These Perugians have so much grain that they can give it to their beasts to eat, and so much meat that they cast it carelessly away, how can we, therefore, hope to subdue them by famine?’ But it chanced that a young acolyte spoke from off the ramparts to some Goths and unwittingly revealed to them the distress and the mortality reigning in the city by reason of the want of food; and the stratagem of S. Ercolano becoming known in the camp, the infuriated Goths, hot with anger, returned to the attack and with impetuous fury assailed the deserted walls. Greeks and Perugians rushed to arms, but what could they, poor starvelings, do against the Gothic host?”
Thus fell Perugia. Our learned author goes on to describe how S. Ercolano was conducted to the ramparts and after his skin had been torn off in strips from the neck downwards, he was beheaded and his body thrown into the ditch. Some faithful adherents gave it secret burial, and finding the body of the foolish young acolyte near by, laid it in the same grave. Later, Uliphus, governor of the city, allowed the Perugians to give their beloved pastor proper burial. To the astonishment of all beholders the Saint’s head was found joined to his body, which seemed like that of a man asleep. This miracle converted many of the Arian Goths to the Roman faith, and “with rejoicings and hymns of praise the body of S. Ercolano was borne through the streets to the church of S. Lorenzo.”
The next picture gives the burial of S. Ercolano. It is only a fragment, and we can hardly piece the scattered groups together. There is a lovely little group of ladies to the left—a set of typical Bonfigli women with exquisite white headgear. The curving front of the Palazzo Pubblico upon the Corso is painted with accurate care, the loggia of Fortebraccio too, is clearly seen and understood. But the picture is only a shadow; the part we most wish to see, namely, the north front of the Palazzo, is wholly obliterated, and the restoration spoils it terribly.
In the next fresco the body of S. Ercolano is being carried from S. Pietro to S. Lorenzo, and Bonfigli has seized this excellent opportunity to paint a fresh portrait of his native city. In the foreground the basilica of S. Pietro with a colonnaded front and unfinished campanile is faithfully depicted, and behind the funeral procession (which by the way is moving in quite the wrong direction) the town towers up into the sky like a pack of yellow cards, broken only by its towers and campaniles.[97]