“—Non se’ tu Oderisi,
L’Onor d’Agobbio, e l’onor di quell’ arte,
Ch’ alluminare è chiamata in Parisi?”
Then, when the fifteenth century was unfolding, two streams of art sweep across the province, distinct, yet mighty, mingling like the waters of the Rhine and Rhone. The many scattered towns of Umbria led to a far greater variety of type, individuality was more frequently maintained, influences spread more fitfully and partially than in those parts of Italy where all studied together, and practice and theory flew like wildfire from one to the other, emulations flourished, traditions were quickly formed and earnestly followed.
Gentile da Fabriano stands forth among the dearth of talent in Umbria at the dawn of the century, as the one master who was great enough to add realism to glowing colour and vivacity of fancy, and who, taking the old missal-painting character as a groundwork, could transplant all the pride of pageantry of the Middle Ages on to his panels, and give us in the gold brocades and velvet robes, in fairy princes and beautiful ladies, tropic birds and strange beasts, such a scene of joyous gallantry that, as in the “Adoration of the Magi,” we can hear the tinkle of bells and the clang of gilded trappings, as the long procession winds down the gay hillside.
After a space, while a dainty colourist like Ottaviano Nelli painted enlarged miniatures and vapid angel faces, there arose a few miles off, at Arezzo, one of the strongest of masters; Piero della Francesca set a star of grand simplicity as a constraining guide, calm and broad, before those men who had the gift of the open eye. The character of that art was as exacting as it was scientific. It was as much geometrical and mathematical as artistic, and was occupied more with problems than with religious feeling. Its power was felt over a wide area, and moved even those who were least naturally alive to it. There seemed a likelihood that Umbrian art would, on the one hand, become absorbed in the Florentine character, hardly distinguishable from it, and, on the other, degenerate into puerile prattle; but there had wandered to Montefalco, one from Florence, who, to the enlightenment and the conscious effort drawn from those who clustered round Donatello and Masaccio, added a temper which appealed directly to the native feeling of Umbria. Benozzo Gozzoli was not a great painter, but his talent for narrative painting set a new model before those whose aptitude in that direction responded to the impulse. A school arose which combined in curious harmony the love of decorative detail of the miniature pictures, the space effects of Piero’s large and airy settings, and the story-telling proclivities of the naïve and garrulous Florentine.
Though Pintoricchio’s early years are obscure, little doubt can exist as to his artistic derivation from Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, who combined the characteristics of the newly developed school in a pre-eminent degree. Rumohr ascribes Pintoricchio’s style primarily to the school of Niccolò da Foligno. This attribution is founded partly on the “Altar-piece of Santa Maria dei Fossi,” the arrangement of which is similar to some of Niccolò’s great anconas, the Madonna and Child enthroned in the centre, saints in panels on either side, a Pietà above, which divides an Annunciation into two parts. The types in this last scene certainly resemble Niccolò’s, and were constantly repeated by Bernardino; but the angels in the Pietà are from Fiorenzo, and the whole spirit is opposed to that of the intense and austere Folignate. It was painted, too, so long after Bernardino’s art was fully formed that it can hardly serve to illustrate any early influence. No doubt, when he visited Foligno at this time, he took many ideas from what Niccolò had left there. Something too he owed to Benedetto Bonfigli; the cheerful naïveté, the quaint adornments of dress and garland which attract us in Bonfigli, are traits which we find in Pintoricchio. The little oval, pointed face, with its arched brows, and small, close shut mouth, the type to which Bonfigli is constant, is that to which Pintoricchio adheres for his Madonna and angels; but this type is to be found too in Fiorenzo’s earlier work, as in his “Adoration of the Child” in the Gallery in Perugia. If we compare this picture with Pintoricchio’s “Nativity” in San Girolamo’s Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, we see at a glance the resemblance that underlies a few superficial variations. The whole construction of the two groups is similar. The Madonna’s bent head, elbows squared, joined palms and finger-tips, the Child, lying partly on His Mother’s robe, the position of the grey-bearded St. Joseph and the shepherds—everywhere Pintoricchio has been guided by the earlier master, though instead of the donor and two young men, who may have been his sons, and who kneel with their great hound behind them, he has substituted St. Jerome and his lion, and shepherds of a more acceptedly religious type, while the group of singing angels overhead is transferred from Fiorenzo’s panel to that other Nativity at Spello.
Over the door of the Sala del Censo in the Palazzo Pubblico at Perugia, is a lunette of a Madonna and Child by Fiorenzo, which might well be Pintoricchio’s own. It has his full touch and copious brush. We find the Mother again in the exquisite little fresco over the door of the Hall of Arts and Sciences in the Borgia Apartments, transplanted almost without alteration of line or expression; while the two angels on either side are those which he uses to support the dead Christ in the Pietà at the top of the polyptych painted for Santa Maria dei Fossi.
We have no trace of Pintoricchio himself ever having visited Florence, but the water flowed to him none the less from the fountainhead, and he assimilated it in his own manner. Fiorenzo, we feel sure, must have been there, and that in those years when Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo approached most nearly to one another; and it was Fiorenzo, and not Perugino, who was the channel through which Florentine influence filtered to Pintoricchio. We recognise Verrocchio in the wide and swollen nostrils, the broad head, the hooking of the little finger, and the treatment of the hair which Fiorenzo adopts; while we perceive that Pollaiuolo has aroused a wish to show more animated action. From Pollaiuolo, too, comes the careful handling of brocaded stuffs, the little, crab-like, clutching hands, the delight in using the costume of the day in all its fantastic picturesqueness. Even more striking is the architectural influence which Fiorenzo conveyed to Pintoricchio. The masters of Umbria became singularly alive to the charm of airy architectural space, and such classic settings as we may date from Brunelleschi’s visit to Rome in 1403, and more especially attribute in their working out, to the high, imaginative faculty and Greek spirit of Leo Battista Alberti, whose spacious arcades are often used merely as decoration. At Urbino, in the court of the Ducal Palace, the Umbrians had one example of the highest interest: here was the taste which Lauranna drew from the Florentines, and which passed onwards to Bramante. Piero della Francesca shows, in his “Flagellation” at Urbino, how keenly he feels the charm of placing groups in this wide, distinguished setting; but none assimilates his teaching so fully in those early days as Fiorenzo, whose remarkable series of small panels of the miracles of San Bernardino, give us, as Dr. Schmarsow says, “the first step, without which Pintoricchio is unthinkable.”[16]
[16] “Pintoricchio in Rom.”