Alinari photo] [Accademia, Florence
THE DEAD CHRIST
The third picture, the "Christ in the Garden," is fuller still of the genius of space composition. Far off are the hills that girdle the landscape, and the eye is carried on from one to the other, each step revealing new beauties, till in the extreme distance the sky and land melt into one another. In the immediate foreground are the three disciples sound asleep in the attitudes that convince you of heavy slumber. In the centre of the picture is Our Lord kneeling on a hillock deeply engaged in prayer, and above is an angel flying toward Him bearing the chalice of sorrow. Below and still further removed from the eye of the spectator are groups of soldiers on the one hand and of priests and people on the other rapidly moving toward the central figure. Their proportions are finely adjusted to their distance and position, and there is an admirable sense of movement in all. Beyond them are the distant town, the hills, the country, and above, with its depth and arch and vastness, suggested in most subtle manner by the light fleecy clouds and by the very curves of the angel's figure and the movement of his wing rises the blue vault of the heaven.
Alinari photo] [Accademia, Florence
CHRIST IN THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE
All the genius of Perugino exists in this picture. Later on there is a greater sweetness in some of the faces, there are more figures, there is a purer and more exquisitely sunny colouring, but in composition this early work contains all the characteristics of the master.
These two must be attributed, however, to a later period than the frescoes and La Calza picture already mentioned, which were for the same convent, and in the interval between painting the frescoes for the Gesuati and the La Calza picture and these two Accademia pictures, Perugino had declined a commission at Orvieto, and had been to Rome and painted there for Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, afterwards Julius II.