Lombardi photo] [Duomo, Siena
THE KNIGHT OF ARINGHIERI
In this same September an altar in the chapel of San Francesco at Siena was unveiled, but this chapel was destroyed by fire, with other works of art, in 1655.
With the spring Pintoricchio again began the painting of the Library frescoes, but he had not proceeded far when Andrea Piccolomini, one of the late Pope’s executors, died. That this must have necessitated a further re-adjustment, and meant another period of delay, we may gather from finding that, in June 1505, Pintoricchio was once more in Rome. The ten months that followed must have been very busy ones, and no doubt the master, after the repeated hitches under his new patrons, was relieved to find himself once more working for those earlier ones in whose service he had always had good fortune.
He was again installed in Santa Maria del Popolo, that church which had been such a favourite place of devotion of Sixtus IV. and other churchmen of the House of Rovere.
The choir, which now absorbed him for some months, and which is the most perfectly preserved and the most untouched of all his works, is a wonderful piece of ceiling painting, in the style in which he had lately adorned the Library ceiling at Siena. In the middle a “Coronation of the Virgin” recalls Fiorenzo and, still more, Bernardino Mariotto, the Umbrian with whom Pintoricchio is so constantly confused. Round this middle octagon the four Evangelists alternate with four sibyls, and at each corner the four Fathers of the Church sit on thrones. The sibyls are graceful types of young Italian women of the Renaissance—full of sweetness and refinement—the women Messer Bernardino knew in the mannered and highly-cultured palaces: no beings of a weird and wild prophetic race. They half recline in the mapped-out divisions; each perfectly fills the space without crowding, and assists the geometrical coup d’œil which is the first impression of the ceiling in its entirety, yet the pose of each is extremely easy and unconstrained, and the lines soft and flowing. Of the Evangelists, each painted in a tondo, St. Matthew with a beautiful angel holding the ink, and St. Luke painting the portrait of the Virgin, are both singularly clear and excellent figures. The stately Fathers of the Church sit on throned seats like those of the Arts and Sciences, or the Sibyls at Spello. Their robes ring the changes on beautiful dashes of colour—white, rich green and rose, scarlet and dark blue. The whole is set in a bold pattern of grotesques in gold and vivid colours, scrolls mounted by women’s busts, quaint birds growing out of acanthus branches, putti riding on griffins, and a score of other fantastic devices. The impression is at once gay, graceful, and distinguished, excellent in decorative effect, and delicate in detail.
[Pavement, Siena Cathedral
SYMBOLICAL SCENE
This was Pintoricchio’s last work in Rome. Here he laid down the brush which he had first taken up in the Sixtine Chapel twenty-three years before. Even now there is more of his art there than that of any painter except Raphael, and at that day how proudly he could pass through the long series of great halls and chapels, which owed their beauty in greatest part to his brush and to his fancy.
Pintoricchio’s last frescoes were three, painted for the palace of Pandolfo Petrucci, in succession to a series nearly completed by Signorelli and Girolamo Genga. They represented classical subjects, and of them there only remains “The Return of Ulysses,” in the National Gallery. The fresco painting in this is rough and slight, the figures have little modelling, but are almost like patterns upon the background, the limbs of the suitors are unstructural even for Pintoricchio, yet the whole effect is charming. The head of the principal suitor is fine and expressive, and is very probably a portrait from life—perhaps one of the sons of the house. Penelope, bending over her web, is natural and life-like—a careful study of a girl in the costume of the day. The scene is drawn in clever perspective, and there is much conscious humour in the accessories; the cat playing with a ball; the sirens grasping their two tails in their hands, as they warble round the galley, to the mast of which Ulysses is bound; the young man in another boat diving headlong into the water, unable to resist their fascination; and the island where the wanderer is interviewing Circe and her swine. Here Pintoricchio is once more fresh and unconventional, fertile in fancy. The bold manner in which the lines of the loom are placed right across the picture is as daring as it is successful. The attitudes and relations of the figures are full of originality, and the uncompromising square of the window lets a flood of light and space into the foreground, so full of action and movement.