It would be absurd to claim for him sublime creative power, tactile values, mastery over form and movement. He has none of these. His persons rarely stand firmly upon both feet; his pages, his kings and queens, are too often drawn and even coloured like playing-cards; his crowds are motley and ill-arranged. The dry and purely scientific student of the schools of Italy will find it more than easy to demonstrate Pintoricchio’s shortcomings: it is less simple to analyse the charm that triumphs in spite of them, and which gives keen pleasure to one side of the artistic nature.
J. A. Symonds says of him that he is a kind of Umbrian Gozzoli, and in his clear and fluent presentation of contemporary life brings us into close relation with the men of his own time. No one loved better than Gozzoli to assemble contemporary celebrities; and in the feeling for incidents of everyday life, in the joy of living, in fondness for garrulous narrative, his frescoes must have been full of suggestion for the Umbrian master of the next half-century, who, in his love for the narrative and the picturesque, surpassed all who had gone before. In Florence, if he had made his trial there, he might have gained more of strong and true study, he might have learned the laws of grouping, of ærial perspective, he might have gained a better knowledge of anatomy, yet in mastering all these, he might have lost something that he possesses: that freshness of feeling which is the spring and sap of all art, that young and winning joy that carries him through scenes of magnificence without losing sense and spirit.
There is in the art of Pintoricchio a direct simplicity of expression and gesture that saves him from conventionality and cloying sweetness. His persons are not above criticism as far as technicalities are concerned, but they have in them this, that they are occupied and absorbed in the business in hand. You may fancy at first that they are artificial, but that is merely their environment; they themselves are simple, they do not pose or look upwards or out of the picture with an affected appeal for admiration. This quality gives to Pintoricchio a truthfulness where he lacks depth. To the last he has a sincerity which underlies his conventionality, just as his dainty care in detail counterbalances his want of freedom and rhythm. His forms lack the nobility of Perugino’s, his religious emotion is less deep, but he is not self-conscious, he has a freshness and raciness which saves him from fatiguing by monotonous sweetness. He does not make his paintings a series of excuses for the solution of scientific problems, so that they are more spontaneous, more the outcome of the man’s natural unfettered inclination, than are the works of some of those who made greater discoveries in the field of painting.
In the picturesque qualities of his work he is completely a child of the Renaissance. Perhaps none harmonises better with the rich and lavish beauty which haunts us still in every little town of Italy. His feeling, sumptuous yet exquisite, his treatment, naïve yet distinguished, is the prerogative of that age of fresh perception, and of unspoiled acquaintance with the beautiful. It is the fairy-tale spirit that so endears him to us. Like the mediæval singers of romance, he guides us through scenes that have a glamour of some day of childhood, when they may have seemed real and possible. The wistful, wide-eyed youths, the tender, dainty Madonnas and angels, the grave, richly-dressed saints and bishops, might all stand for princes, for maidens, and magicians in some enchanted realm of fairy. He does not take us into the region of the tragic, but his fancy, his invention, and resource are fertile and untiring; he leads us on, dazzling, entertaining us with a child-like amusement, disarming criticism by a lovable quality which enlightens us as to the natural sensibility of the painter’s mind, a sort of penetrating sweetness with which he can endow his creations. Perhaps the truest explanation of his charm is to be found in the union of two incongruous elements. The artificial and mannered grace, the search after the exquisite and the splendid, joined to the naïve and childish simplicity, the freshness and arcadian fancy of the Umbrian school. It is such a combination as enchants us in a child masquerading in gorgeous robes, or in a wild honeysuckle dancing over a richly-carved marble column. Certain it is, that here we possess the very cream of that fantastic aspect of the Renaissance in conjunction with the most distinctive features of purely Umbrian art.
Mr. Berenson has given us a fine appreciation of Pintoricchio’s feeling for space and for space-decoration. In this, so Umbrian a characteristic, he was a worthy follower of Fiorenzo, the not unworthy second to Perugino, and a forerunner of Raphael. The ample and spacious setting of his groups takes off from their cramped and crowded effect. Where the action is awkward, or the colour heavy, the whole spirit is lightened and lifted as you breathe the air of those delicious landscapes, or wander in imagination under those high-poised arcades, or look out from a palace chamber at the freedom and sweet breezes of a mountain distance. It is the more remarkable that Pintoricchio is able to give us this charm of landscape, as he adheres to his early training, and finishes the most distant parts in delicate detail.
It is as a decorator that he holds his own most successfully among his contemporaries. It soon became apparent that no one could cover the walls of palace or chapel with an ornamentation so rich and gay, so advantageous to the position, so homogeneous in character. To find any tout ensemble to compare as decoration with the Borgia Apartments we must look at early mosaics, at the opulence of the little church of San Prassede, or the peacock hues of San Vitale at Ravenna. To estimate his achievement we must weigh what he has made of those rooms, “si desespèrément carrées,” or of the oblong and barn-like space of the Libreria in Siena.
He is mainly empirical rather than scientific, even in his most successful moments, but that his want of drawing was due to insufficient study of the nude is shown by the fact that his touch is fine and strong, his faces, hands and feet, always well and firmly drawn, his outlines delicate and decisive. He individualises his faces, and the bystanders in his crowded scenes show a most interesting variety and reality.
When not painting fresco he is constant to the use of tempera. Unfortunately, he is too much given to sacrifice the transparency and depth of his colour by a lavish use of retouching à secco. In order to gratify his love for brilliancy, he produces an opaque surface, and is apt to give us a sort of splendid gaiety in exchange for real depth. His use of his gorgeous pigments is extremely skilful, especially towards the middle period. In the Sixtine Chapel frescoes, he has hardly let himself go, and in the Siena Library he inclines to be gaudy and glaring; but in many of his scenes the greens and peacock-blues, the rich, soft rose-pinks, the purples and autumn gold are those of a man whose nature was keenly alive to the joy of colour. His use of embossed gold is dictated by the same natural bent towards the gay and decorative. This small, mean-looking, deaf man was rarely sensitive to fulness of life, to splendour, and the delight of the eye, and wherever he has covered a wall with his work, or left a panel or an altar-piece, we get a glance back at an age which was not afraid of frank magnificence, guided by a purer taste than we can boast.
Pintoricchio never shows the ear in his female heads. In the men’s it is large, placed high, with the inner cartilage strongly defined. The hand has a short metacarpus and long fingers, the thumb well separated, and the little finger hooked in Fiorenzo’s manner. He paints with a full brush, and has a heavy, liquid touch in fresco, but in working in panel he shows a beautiful surface quality which oil painting could not surpass.