Pintoricchio

by Evelyn March Phillipps

In the background on the left, the same white figure is being hurried to execution by guards in the dress of the fifteenth century, while Daniel, mounted on a white horse and holding a sceptre, intervenes in her favour. On the other side, the elders, bound to a tree, are stoned to death, even a little figure of a child casting stones at them. These figures show a great deal of animated action and good drawing and modelling, and are full of life and spirit. Behind is a landscape in the well-known style of Pintoricchio—the whole strongly recalling the work of Fiorenzo. Bernardino here is in his most idyllic and fairy-tale vein, and nowhere is the painting more finished; but the very great care of detail, carried into the most distant part, gives too great an importance to accessories, and damages the unity of the whole, showing him less as a great composer than a decorator.

In the next fresco, Santa Barbara escapes from the tower in which she had been imprisoned by her cruel father, and in which she had built three windows in honour of the Trinity. On the left of the tower we see the great rent made by a miracle, through which she escaped. The father, armed with a scimitar, and shielding his eyes with his hand, is anxiously searching for her in the wrong direction. He is accompanied by two armed followers, one of whom catches sight of her, and, suddenly converted, looks longingly after her. In the background the saint escapes in company with Santa Giulia, and on the right her father is asking for news from a shepherd, who, for betraying that he has seen her, is turned into a marble pillar and painted white to convey this idea. Santa Barbara herself is a naïve and charming figure, gracefully posed, with flying draperies and long fair hair circled with pearls. Her streaming locks and blowing draperies give the impression of flight and movement very successfully. The whole effect is gay and fanciful. The saint, her little fair face turned up, her hands clasped, might be a fairy princess, escaping from an enchanted castle, over a sward carpeted with blossoms. She makes a bright figure in effective contrast to the white-robed Susanna.

The lunette opposite this is one of the happiest of the series—“The Visit of St. Anthony to Paul the Hermit.” Beneath a rough natural stone archway in which the hermitage is concealed, its presence indicated by the bell which the hermit uses to call himself to prayers, the two saints sit, sharing the loaf of bread which has been brought by the faithful raven, which flies away on the left. Close to St. Paul two disciples in white robes contemplate the edifying conversation, behind St. Anthony are grouped three women, richly dressed. They advance with half-closed, wanton eyes, and by the little horns on their fashionably dressed hair, their bats’ wings, and the claws peeping out from under their flowing skirts, their demoniacal character is betrayed. The last of the group, with head thrown back and hands resting on either side of her waist, is a very original and beautiful figure. The face and hands of St. Anthony are strongly drawn and the robes finely draped. In the hermit, dressed in the legendary garment of palm leaves, and in the very inferior figures of disciples, the hand of an assistant may be seen. The latter recall Signorelli, without his force and freshness.

Anderson photo] [Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome
ST. ANTHONY AND ST. PAUL—HERMITS

In “The Visitation,” which fills the remaining space on this side, we have one of those sweet, home-like narrative paintings so dear to Umbrian art. The Virgin and St. Elizabeth, dressed in the long conventional blue and green draperies, clasp hands in the foreground, the Virgin with downcast eyes, the saint with the searching gaze prescribed by tradition. Behind them, St. Joseph leans on a staff, and a procession of children and pages follows: a girl with graceful swathings of scarf and sleeve carries a basket of fruit upon her head, and with a child at her feet, is distantly reminiscent of certain figures by Botticelli in the Sixtine Chapel. The smiling landscape, across which the visitors have journeyed, is seen through a perspective of elaborately drawn and decorated arches, on which some of those drawings of grotesque ornamentation can be discerned. On the right, in the shadows of the arcades, is a delightful group, one of those bits with which Pintoricchio gives interest and charm to his compositions. Zacharias, who is as yet unaware of the arrival, leans in an angle, absorbed in a book. On the ground a group of women, young and old, are occupied in spinning and embroidery; at the back another graceful figure twirls a distaff, and a child plays with a dog on the ground in front. In some of the secondary parts of the execution of this, Schmarsow sees the hand of Pintoricchio’s best scholar. The architecture has nothing of the Umbrian style, but shows the hand of one to whom the Lombard decoration, with its terra-cotta work, is familiar. The whole of the fresco is more broadly painted, the draperies in large, broad folds, the value of the landscape better kept, more softly modulated than in any we have yet noticed.

Anderson photo] [Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome
THE DEMON WOMEN
(Detail from the fresco of “St. Anthony and St. Paul”)