Anderson photo] [Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome
FIGURE OF THE POPE
(A detail from “Pope Alexander VI. adoring the Risen Christ”)
A marble doorway surrounded by two putti bearing a shield, leads to the Hall of Saints. Here Pintoricchio has surpassed himself in beauty. Here is more varied and more lively action and better effects of grouping than we find anywhere in his work, except in the Sixtine Chapel. When these apartments were little known, the Libreria at Siena was often quoted as the achievement on which the Umbrian master’s fame rested, but to know him at his best we must see him here in Rome. For technique, colour, decoration, and poetical feeling, these rooms, and especially the Hall of Saints, rank higher than anything else he has left, with the exception, perhaps, of the Buffalini and Sixtine Chapels.
The legends of the saints are varied by a scene from the Old and one from the New Testament. It does not appear what was the reason of this conjunction.
Alinari photo] [Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome
THE KNEELING MAN
(A detail from the “Assumption of the Virgin”)
Over the door we have “Susanna and the Elders.” The middle of the composition is occupied by a splendid fountain in the style of the Renaissance. The top part, with the child holding the dolphin, resembles Verrocchio’s work in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The fountain is placed in a little garden plot set round with palings and a rose hedge, and the fanciful hand which painted it has filled it with animals: a hare, a stag lying down by the shoes which Susanna has just slipped off, a fawn, white rabbits gambolling in all directions, a monkey attached to a golden chain. These are evidently painted by a real student-lover of animals. In front of the fountain stands the saint, in a clinging white robe that reminds us of the sculpture of Agostino di Duccio; her feet are bare; a heavy necklace and pendant are round her throat. The two elders, in rich robes and Eastern turbans, grasp her arms on either side; but her attitude, with her hand on the shoulder of one, is free from violent emotion, calm and trustful. Pintoricchio has seldom painted a more exquisite and poetical figure than this, with fair head and delicately-modelled arms and hands. Its purity and innocence, and the subject of the legend, make it a strange choice for the private apartments of a Borgia.
Anderson photo] [Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome
THE STORY OF SUSANNA