Nor was Urbino without painters at this period: Fiorillo names Lorenzo da San Severino. At Urbino some pictures still remain of Giovanni Sanzio, the father of Raphael, who by the Duchess Giovanna della Rovere is called a very ingenious artist: a foreshortened figure of St. Sebastian, painted by him for the church of that saint, has been imitated by Raphael in an early picture of Our Lady's Wedding, at Città di Castello. He subscribed himself Io. Sanctis Urbi.; viz. Urbinas. Such at least is the inscription on his Annunciation at Sinigaglia, a work of high finish, but unequal in its parts, and in the best, though less genial, approaching the style of Pietro Perugino, with whom he had for some time co-operated. But the most distinguished Urbinese artist was Bartolommeo Corradini, a Dominican, commonly called Frà Carnevale: at the Osservanza there is a picture of his, defective in perspective, with draperies frittered into the usual tatters of the time, but with faces that breathe and speak, and airs of dignity and ease: he was one of the first who introduced portrait into historic composition, a method adopted and often practised by Raphael, who at Urbino had studied his works.
Perugia laid an early claim to Art, at least as a craft. Mariotti tells of one Tullio a Perugine painter about 1219, and in a long file of quattrocentists, allots the most conspicuous places to Lorenzo di Lorenzo, Bartolommeo Caporali, whose works are dated about 1487, but above all to Benedetto Bonfigli. Yet with this abundance of home-bred artists, Perugia employed in its public works the hands of strangers, and chiefly Tuscans; it was to Florence, States and Princes looked for that master-style which could give splendour to a great commission. When Sisto IV. planned the decorations of the Sistina, the greater number of conscripts for the work were Tuscans, and Pietro Perugino the only artist drawn from his subjects among them.
Pietro Vannucci, of Città della Pieve, as he subscribed some pictures, or of Perugia, as he did others, being a citizen of that place, studied, if we believe Vasari, under a master of little eminence; but according to the more authentic researches of Mariotti,[90] was a pupil, and sufficiently advanced himself by the instructions of Bonfigli and Piero della Francesca, to finish his style on the works of Giotto and Masaccio at Florence, without entering the school of Verrocchio.
Those who have contemplated the works of Pietro will without much difficulty discover two styles of composition, form, colour, and execution: the first was the result of the instructions he received in the Roman, the second, that of the impression made on his mind and hand by the Tuscan School: what he painted in oil and of small dimensions, generally belongs to the first; what he executed in fresco to the second period. There we find the hardness, the haggard forms, the miserly scantiness of drapery, the Gothic apposition and anxious finish with which he is charged, relieved by azure blues, emerald greens, violet and crimson hues, the legacies of missal-painting, and a certain air of juvenile and female grace, with suavity of countenance and colour: beauties which not only followed him in his second style, but were rendered more impressive by rudiments of that breadth which seems to be the privilege of fresco, by keeping, mellowness, tone, and approaches to composition, as in the altar-piece of the Kindred of the Saviour and the fresco in the Hall of the Change, at Perugia.
Whilst the physiognomic monotony which had hitherto dulled the human feature, began to give way to expression and character in the works of this period, it is not easy to explain why its companion, that Gothic symmetry in the arrangement of the whole, should not only have been retained but aggravated into a studied parallelism; not that pathetic repetition of attitude and gesture which forces the moment of the subject more irresistibly on the mind than the most varied contrasts, but a nearly rectilinear apposition, whose principal law was to place, by a central figure, on each side of the picture, an equal number of subordinate ones; a law that extended itself to the most minute detail, and bade buildings, flowers, clouds and pebbles, re-echo each other; and all this in the face of Giotto, whose Navicella, Death of Maria, and other works, gave evidence that his composition had, a century before, disdained to move in the trammels which were now suffered to check that of Pietro Perugino, and for no inconsiderable time the composition of Raphael himself.
Invention was not the element of Pietro. His crucifixions, depositions, burials, ascensions, and assumptions, are the brothers and sisters of one family. He was blamed for this sterility even in his own time, and defended himself by saying that, if he possessed little, he owed nothing, and that what had pleased in one place could not displease in another. It does not indeed offend to find the scenery of his St. Peter receiving the keys in the Sistina, repeated in the Wedding of our Lady at Perugia, and to meet the beauties here concentrated which he had singly scattered over various places.
Pietro had vigour of constitution and length of life, and if he profited by the works of Raphael, whom he outlived, might have done so by those of Lionardo and Buonarroti. In few men so many contradictory qualities seem to have united: ridiculed for a degree of avarice, which, it was said, made him withhold the necessary drapery from his figures, he is yet allowed by Vasari to have been greedier to accumulate than sordid in the use of wealth, and to have pleased himself by marrying "a beautiful damsel, whom he so much delighted in seeing elegantly dressed both abroad and at home, that he was often suspected of having dressed her himself." By her he had children, but no records enable us to judge of him as a parent. That he was a good and kind master, is proved by the numerous scholars he reared, and still more by the pride which the most eminent and best of them took, by introducing him more than once in his works, to perpetuate with his own gratitude the memory of his master. With this kindness for his pupils, Pietro connected intolerance of rivals and a mordacity of language, which provoked Michael Agnolo to call him publicly a dunce (goffo) in art. His life was spent in receiving commissions from the clergy, in meditating and composing subjects of devotion; and yet, if we believe his biographer, he carried infidelity to a degree which resisted all arguments for the immortality of the soul, and with words dictated by an obstinacy worthy of his marble brains,[91] rejected all invitations to better information. Of the numerous scholars whom he had reared, the greater part followed his manner with servile attachment; hence many of their works have been ascribed to him, by those who did not form their judgment at Perugia, or at Florence in Sta. Chiara and the Ducal palace: thus he pays forfeit for many a holy family of Guerino da Pistoia, Rocco Zoppo, or some other of his Tuscan scholars. The best and least enthralled of his pupils belong to the Roman school: Bernardino Pinturicchio, less praised by Vasari than he deserves, without the correctness of his master, and with more Gothic profusion of gold-lace and brocade, possesses magnificence of plan, expression of countenance, and propriety of composition. Familiar with Raphael, who was his assistant at Siena, he made attempts to imitate his grace, and sometimes not without success: at Rome, the Vatican and Araceli Temple possess some of his works; at Siena he painted, in ten pictures, the history of Pio II. and added one of Pio III. his employer, and these, with what he left in the Dome of Spello, are the best of his labours.
Of at more independent and grander spirit was Andrea Luigi, of Assisi, surnamed L'Ingegno, the Genius. He assisted Pietro in the Change-hall at Perugia, and there and in his Prophets and Sibyls at Assisi, aggrandized and mellowed the style of his master to a degree, which led Sandrart, with others, to ascribe the latter work to Raphael; but blindness checked his career in the bloom of life, and left the art to Raphael without a rival.
Domenico di Paris Alfani added, likewise, some improvements to the style of Pietro. His name was nearly sunk in that of his son or brother Orazio, and time and dates alone have re-asserted its right to some excellent works long adjudged to the other; and which, were it not for an insipid sweetness of tone bordering on that of Baroccio, seem to have been inspired by the principles of Raphael.
Of Pietro's many ultramontane pupils, Giovanni Spagnuolo, a Spaniard, called Lo Spagna, who settled at Spoleto, is considered by Vasari as the most eminent. But all these names united confer less celebrity on Pietro, than the felicity of having reared the powers of Raffaello Sanzio, if not the founder, the great establisher of the Roman School.