After his death Grania lived on in Siena, and two years after, as his executor and trustee, sold two lots of land to one of the Chigi for 1677 florins. Again, in the following year, she sought permission to sell the land which was the portion of her daughter Faustina, and she makes a will which is dated May 22nd, 1518. The man who was said to be her lover afterwards married her daughter Egidia.

We possess several portraits of Pintoricchio from his own hand; all are sufficiently like one another, though painted at different periods of his life, to assure us that they were like the original. The first is in the fresco of the “Argument of St. Catherine,” in the Borgia Apartments. The painter at this time must have been about thirty-nine years old. His portrait certainly looks much younger; but he was a thin, dark man who very possibly looked less than his years, or he may have purposely represented himself so, as we notice this in other portraits. The face is an interesting and sensitive one, with speaking eyes and a melancholy expression. In the striking head which he has signed and placed as a picture on the walls of the Virgin’s chamber in the chapel of the Baglioni at Spello, the face has sharpened and aged considerably, though it still looks young for a man of fifty-two. The lines have deepened, the mouth is compressed, and the face wears a look of ill-health, almost of suffering. It has the dark, arched brows of the artist, and clever, observant eyes which look out at us, sideways, tending to give a suspicious look, though probably it was only that he saw himself so in a mirror. Again, he stands in the row of portraits in the fresco of the “Canonisation of St. Catherine,” in the Library at Siena. This face, too, has an expression of bitterness and melancholy—pinched lips, and sad, regretful eyes.[15] The self-conscious expression of all leads us to suspect that his was a self-tormenting, morbid nature, such as the artistic temperament and keen sense of beauty might well have combined with a sickly body to produce. In the eyes, too, it is easy to read that fantastic touch which came out in his love for story and for the grotesque, and perhaps there is something of that aloofness which the deafness, which led to his nickname, so often gives.

[15] In the group of Apostles in the “Assumption” at Naples is one, the fifth on the left, which he is said to have meant for himself, but it is less characteristic than those already noticed.

That he was a lovable man is, I think, evident. We hear of no quarrels with his fellow-artists; Perugino secured him some of the best positions in the Sixtine, Signorelli was his child’s sponsor. He had clearly the art of managing his assistants, who everywhere worked intelligently under him. With Fiorenzo his artistic relations must have been of the closest. Pope Alexander valued him, and Cæsar’s mention is an affectionate one, while the letter of Cardinal Baglioni is full of friendliness. Besides this, few things are more interesting in the history of artists’ friendships than the close confidence and affection which all study of the frescoes at Siena convinces us existed between him and the young Raphael. Sigismondo Tizio, in his MS., gives his opinion that Bernardino surpassed Perugino as a painter, but that he had less sense and prudence than Vannucci, and was given to empty chatter.

A small number of Pintoricchio’s works cannot be dated, and we must be satisfied with mentioning them, and considering the times at which they might have been produced.

His name is written variously in the documents of the time. In the grants of land signed by Cardinal Camerlengo, it is Pentoricchio, and Pentorichio on the fresco of Geometry in the Borgia rooms. Cardinal Baglioni writes it Pintorichio. In Grania’s petition it appears as Pinturicchio. He himself signs his last picture, the “Cross-bearing Christ” in the Palazzo Borromeo, Pintoricchio, and to this form I have adhered. In the documents he is usually styled Messer Bernardino.

[CHAPTER II]
DERIVATION AND CHARACTER OF HIS ART

UMBRIA is a land of late development in the history of Italian painting, and of a sharp division in the character of its art. No town of the importance of Siena, second only to Florence, held sway in that part of Italy, nor do we find any name in its early history which we can place side by side with Giotto, Orcagna, or Duccio di Buoninsegna. It is difficult to account for this: the Umbrian plains were indeed ravaged again and again with blood and carnage, were seized upon, now by this party, and now by that; but all acquaintance with the art of the Renaissance bears in upon us that art as a rule only flourished more strongly when fed by war and ruin. One tyrant after another, as he rested from his conquests, became the patron of the painters. Pictures were painted to immortalise great victories, the altar-piece upon which the fame of Duccio chiefly hangs, was ordered by the Consiglio of Siena as a thank-offering to the Virgin after the battle of Monte Aperto.

The accounts of the cathedral at Orvieto give us names of artists who devoted themselves to its decoration towards the end of the fourteenth century—others were working in Perugia, painting effigies of traitors, hanging head downwards on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico, but we have no reason to rank them higher than those who have left traces of their work in the little votive chapels that lie in the hills and out-of-the-way corners of Umbria. Some of these, going back to 1393, are not without a character of their own, guiltless indeed, of technique, but naïve, vivid, and full of energy; yet they show little of that gradual growth which marks the Florentine school, nor do we find in them any trace of the fine, precise touch, which the early Sienese painters drew from the school of Byzantium. According to Mariotti, the art of miniature painting and illumination was carried on with great enthusiasm in Perugia, in the fourteenth century. Dante speaks of Oderisio of Gubbio: