This part of the work may have been just seen by the Cardinal, who became Pope, September 21st, 1503, dying three weeks later, and bringing Pintoricchio’s work to a standstill. His patron’s death freed him for the time from his inability to take private orders, and he promptly accepted one from the family of Aringhieri, and between this autumn and the following August, painted the frescoes in the Chapel of San Giovanni in Siena Cathedral; while on March 13th, in the spring of 1505, he was paid for the design of Fortune for the cathedral pavement. Rather before this, the work in the library had been begun, as it was only in abeyance for a little over a year; but the death of Cardinal Andrea Piccolomini in June 1505 again delayed its progress for a short time. Pintoricchio started thereupon on a visit to Rome, which must have been crowded with work if he now accomplished the decoration of the choir of Santa Maria del Popolo, and returned early in 1506 to continue the work in the library. It now went on with no further hindrance. In May or June 1508 all the compartments were finished, and the building handed over to the Piccolomini family, from whom the last payment under the contract was received in January 1509.
There is no document to show exactly when he married, but from the table in Milanesi’s edition of Vasari, a daughter, Adriana, who had married a Perugian, died in 1519. She, and probably two others, Faustina and Egidia, must have been born before he left for Siena. There is, however, no trace in the Perugian archives of his wife or children, and Mariotti, writing in 1788, suggests that a search among the documents of Siena may determine the question. Here it is that we find entries of the birth of those children born after he moved to Siena, Giulio Cesare, Camillo Giuliano, and a second Faustina. His wife, as we learn from the petitions she presented after his death, was Grania, daughter of one Niccolò of Bologna or Modena. From the number of her children, and the unhappy relations which seem to have existed between husband and wife, we surmise that Pintoricchio married a woman much younger than himself. If three children were born before 1502, he probably married about 1496-98, at which time he was living in Perugia, after his return from Rome, when he would have been forty-two to forty-four years of age.
In the year that his first son was born, Pintoricchio matriculated at the College of Painters at Perugia. He is there described as Bernardinus Becti, detto il Pinturicchio, whose habitation was at the Porta San Angelo.[12] In December of the same year, the magistrates of Siena approve of the Commune of Montemassi making him a donation of twenty “moggie” of land.[13] Fortified, doubtless, by his success in combating Perugian taxes, he immediately applies to the Council of Siena to free the grant for thirty years from taxes of “dazzi and gabelli.” This was conceded, with the exception of the gate tax. The petition runs:
[12] Vermiglioli, App. (3).
[13] Archives of Siena. Vermiglioli, App. xx. and xxi.
“Bernardino Pintoricchio, who now addresses the most respected officials (of the Balia), is the servant of your Lordships, and not the least among renowned painters; for whom, as Cicero has written, the Romans in early times held but little. Yet after the increase of the empire, and in consequence of Eastern victories and the conquest of the Greek cities, they called the best from all parts of the world, not hesitating to seize all the finest pictures and sculptures which they could discover. They admitted painting to be supreme, similar to the liberal arts, and a rival to poesy. And artists being usually esteemed by those who govern republics, the said Bernardino has elected Sienna to be his home, hoping to live and reside there; (therefore) confiding in the clemency of your Lordships, and considering the adverse nature of the times, the smallness and diminution of profits, and the weight of his family; having heard also that craftsmen taking up their abode here receive grants of immunities, he prays exemption for thirty years from all taxes whatever, whether present or to come.”[14]
[14] Doc. Sen. iii. 33-4. Trans. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. iii. p. 285.
In the spring of 1508 he was back across Italy to little Spello, where, in the transept of Sant’ Andrea, he left an altar-painting, a Madonna and Saints, which does not add materially to his reputation. On a little stool in the foreground of the picture is painted a letter of Cardinal Baglioni, dated April 8th, 1508, written from his castle of Rocca di Zocco, full of affectionate assurances, and asking the painter to return to Siena. Its inclusion has been imputed to Pintoricchio’s vanity; but a man who had been friends with Popes, and who had long been courted on all sides, was hardly likely to be uplifted by the friendship of a simple Cardinal-bishop. It is more likely that he was bitten with a rather inartistic fancy for painting objects lying about, to deceive the eye, and hit upon this as an appropriate one.
He now paid his last visit to Rome: Pope Julius II. had summoned him, together with Perugino, Signorelli, and others, to consider the decoration of the Vatican rooms. Giambattista Caporali, the historian, speaks of a supper at which they were all present at the house of Bramante. Their host was the man who had introduced young Raphael to the Pope, and Pintoricchio, among the rest, had the mortification of seeing himself superseded in the city where he had been foremost a few years earlier. He and Signorelli returned to Siena together, and the master of Cortona stood sponsor to the child born in January 1509. In October, Pintoricchio had sold a house in the third ward of the city to Pandolfo Petrucci for 420 florins. He was in close contact at this time with that great merchant prince, and was employed with Signorelli on Petrucci’s new palace, where he painted the frescoes, of which one, the “Return of Ulysses,” in the National Gallery, is all that remains. We find him buying land in Siena and selling it in Perugia, making his will, and arranging his affairs. In the last year of his life he painted that brilliant and tender little picture of “Christ bearing the Cross,” now in the Borromeo Palace at Milan. He was suspicious and unhappy about his wife’s behaviour, and a fresh will was made, to which a codicil was added in September and another in October. In the first he deprived her of some of the money he had already left her, but he returned it in the last addition.
Vasari’s story of the cause of his death, which took place December 11th, 1513, can be nothing but a fable. He tells us that Pintoricchio was executing some work for the Fathers of San Francesco, and being hampered by a heavy bureau in the room assigned to him, insisted on having it moved. In the transit it broke open, and a treasure of gold was discovered in the secret drawer, so much to the chagrin of the painter that he never held up his head again. The friends who knew the painter in Siena do not allude to any such occurrence; and the popular master, entrusted with more commissions than he could execute, well paid and honoured by all men, was not likely to be upset by the sight of some gold coins, even if he could persuade himself that he had any right to them. The real circumstances of his death were sadder, if less sensational. Sigismondo Tizio, a Sienese historian, writer of a mass of almost unedited matter, who was his attached friend and his neighbour in the parish of San Vincenzo and Sant’ Anastasia, has left a record of his last illness, in which he accuses his wife Grania of causing his death by her neglect. Tizio says that she went about with her lover, Girolamo di Paolo, nicknamed il Paffo, a soldier of the Piazza at Siena, and that Bernardino was shut up and left to die of starvation; that some women heard his cries and went to his assistance, and that it was from them that Tizio afterwards learned these particulars. From Tizio’s way of describing it he seems to accuse her of a deliberate attempt to starve her husband; but as no proceedings were ever taken against her, and she succeeded in peace to her inheritance, we may gather that she was not guilty of actually criminal conduct, though her neglect was sufficient to hasten the death of a man attacked by serious illness and needing careful nursing. Bernardino Betti lies buried in the Parish Church of San Vincenzo, joining the Oratory of the Contrade of the Ostrich. In 1830 the Abbé de Angelis put up a plate with an inscription to his memory. Mariotti speaks of a Giovanni di Pintoricchio who was a canon of the Cathedral of Perugia in 1525; but Pintoricchio’s own sons would have then been too young to hold such a post, and we hear nothing in later years of his descendants.