Fig. 178. Perugino. Mystical Crucifixion. Fresco.—Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. Florence.
So far he appears as a critic and amender of the Early Renaissance style. His positive contribution was a particularly spacious and lovely sort of landscape, an immensity of light and air to set behind the restricted patterns of his figures. This landscape is a beautiful generalization of the scenery of the upper Tiber valley. The forms are few. Feathery trees mark the middle distance; a river valley opens gently with interlocking banks toward distant blue mountains. Above a silvery horizon, the heavens gradually deepen to an intense blue, accentuated by sparse floating clouds. There are few colors, a warm brown, a fresh green, a paler and a deeper blue, a variety of grays. With these simple means is attained a sense of infinite space and of encompassing peace.
All these perfections are in the great frescoed Crucifixion Figure [178], in the convent of Santa Maria Maddelena dei Pazzi, at Florence. The date is 1495, Perugino’s fifty-second year. The lyrical quietism of the effect rests on delicate evasions of the very formal symmetry. Such features as the tilted head of the Saint John and the three trees at the left balancing the Magdalen at the right of the cross are essential. Indeed any slight change either in the position of the figures or the lines of the landscape would produce a discord.
Fig. 179. Perugina. Enthroned Madonna.—Vatican.
We have a very similar effect with the addition of a stately and simple architecture in the enthroned Madonna of the Vatican. Figure [179]. Again the formality of the pyramidal pattern is relieved by varied dispositions of the figures which individually considered may seem affected, but which are essential to the composition. More overtly emotional but still restrained is the Deposition, Figure [180a], of the Uffizi Gallery. It is arranged as an oval with catenary internal curves, anticipating much more complicated patterns of Raphael. At this moment, 1494, no living artist but Leonardo could have woven this group together with such certainty of taste, and he could have hardly equalled its broad and serene landscape.
In the first years of the new century Perugino decorated the merchants’ exchange of Perugia, the Cambio, with frescoes partly religious, partly moral and symbolical. The most famous represent the Virtues, Figure [180], in pairs, hovering in the heavens with their representatives below. For example, Prudence and Justice with the great law-givers. So Fortitude and Temperance are represented respectively by the venerable forms of brave Horatius, and Leonidas; of Cato and Cincinnatus. It seems that Perugino executed most of this latter decoration through assistants, and it has been suggested that Raphael is responsible both for the design and painting of the beautiful Sibyls.[[67]]
Fig. 180. Perugino. Prudence and Justice with their Representatives. Fresco.—Cambio, Perugia.