Private photo] [Picture Gallery, Siena
THE CHRIST-CHILD AND ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST
(From the Holy Family)
Although Pintoricchio’s art was so much admired during his lifetime, it is difficult to show that it exercised much after-influence. Fascinating as it is in some ways, it represents the last survival of a dying school. The world to which he belonged, the taste which delighted in his creations, disappeared with him, and was replaced by an age of conscious modernism which was eager to sweep aside all that seemed archaic in the immediate past. The thirst for knowledge and for scientific research was waxing intense, and the craze for the display of knowledge with its hidden seeds of decay soon followed. Among his pupils, Matteo Balducci, who we know from Vasari worked with him in Rome, has left several pictures at Siena. These are all Umbrian in treatment, and show the influence of Pintoricchio, but they lack his delicate drawing; the forms are long and weak, and the colour dim and washy. Pietro di Domenico, a Sienese, has panels in imitation of him; but the most notable example of his influence is to be found in that series of the “Story of Griselda,” in the National Gallery, painted by an unknown artist, who, as Miss Cruttwell points out, was also influenced by Signorelli, and in whom sense of form and feeling for originality are more developed than in other followers of the Umbrian master. Gerino da Pistoia is mentioned by Vasari as a friend of Pintoricchio, who worked much with him and Perugino, and an altar-piece by him at Pistoia has traces of both masters. Crowe and Cavalcaselle see his co-operation in the “Last Supper” in Sant’ Onofrio in Florence, and account thus for the signs it shows of Pintoricchio’s influence. Giovanni Bertucci of Faenza is another Umbrian whose pictures have often been attributed to Pintoricchio. The Mother and Child in the “Glorification” by him in the National Gallery are not unlike our master’s in Sant’ Andrea at Spello. We can trace many suggestions afforded to Raphael. The “Dispute” in the Borgia Apartments in all probability bent Raphael’s mind to the conception of the “Disputa” in the Stanze, and inspired the idea of his beautiful classic and sacred medallions set in decorative framework, and of the enthroned figures of Music, Theology, and the rest; and the use made by Pintoricchio of architectural interiors may have first inspired the supreme setting of the “School of Athens.”
Marcozzi photo] [Palazzo Borromeo, Milan
CHRIST BEARING THE CROSS
Down to recent years Pintoricchio was quite overlooked or treated with contempt, and for the purely scientific school he has still little merit. He certainly is not able to inspire that sort of interest that we feel in painters who worked, looking backward to see what had been done, and forward to discover what yet remained to do. We do not strive with him and triumph with him over defeated difficulties. He was a craftsman, as were all artists worthy of the name at that day, and his work is always painstaking and adequate, with nothing sloppy or careless in its execution; but painting as a craft, with its secrets and its possibilities, was not his first object, so that, without being able to divide his work into any distinct periods, we find that his earlier life, when he was still learning, was on the whole the time when he was most successful in the artistic sense; and in such frescoes as the “Journey of Moses” and the “Life of San Bernardino” he gives promise of an excellence which is not afterwards adequately realised. He was an illustrator, and as such, perhaps, never touched the highest side of painting. We find in him the natural tendency of a decorator who undertakes large commissions as a matter of business, to repeat forms and situations; yet, with every temptation to mechanical treatment and repetition, it is the true artist in Pintoricchio which saves him from becoming monotonous. To the very last, as in the “Return of Ulysses,” or the “Holy Family” at Siena, his invention and fancy are alert, varying every accessory, displaying a freshness and an enjoyment in his creations which are irresistibly attractive. In all his illustration the lyric faculty is his. He follows the lives, the history, the fashions of his time with minute persistence, but always with some charm added to prosaic actuality. He is to painting what the ballad-singer is to poetry: slight, garrulous, naïve, infectious, he has a haunting melody of his own, and through his eyes we watch the widening of one aspect of that golden day.
Ruskin speaks of the value to us of the impression made by a scene upon the mind of the artist; it is the impression stamped by the strange and enchanting grace of that world of the Renaissance upon one man, and handed on by him with spontaneity and undoubting delight, which is so precious to us in his work.