an influence carried by them to Nuremberg and Cologne, to enrich the already gaudy tendencies of ultramontane taste. But Gentile da Fabriano possesses another claim upon the student of early painting, hitherto inadequately noticed. To the lessons of his father, a learned mathematician, he may have owed the linear perspective which, in many of his productions, anticipated the improvements of Piero della Francesca. This is observable in the Zeno picture, and still more in a small predella in my possession, where his favourite theme, the Epiphany, is completed by a background accurately laid out in lines and compartments, such as we see in the Dutch gardens of the seventeenth century. But to this question we must return.
Among the artists who maintained in Umbria the influences left by Ottaviano and Gentile, two were of special merit, Nicolò Alunno, of Foligno, and Benedetto Bonfigli, of Perugia. Their works have been often confounded, but with the latter only have we to do, for, besides being nearer to Gentile both in age and in manner, he is generally considered as the master of Pietro Perugino,[*140] and thus forms a link in the artistic chain which we are endeavouring to establish, through the best Umbrian painters, from Oderigi of Gubbio to Raffaele of Urbino. Of Bonfigli there are several interesting and well-preserved specimens in his native town, dated about 1466, but it must be owned that none of the earliest known works of Perugino exhibit much trace of his style. These, however, are all supposed posterior to Pietro's first visit to Florence, where his ideas must have undergone vast development from the examples of Masaccio and other masters, who there formed a galaxy of talent about the middle of the fifteenth century.[*141] In that city he formed his early friendship with Leonardo da Vinci, which Sanzi says was cemented by parity of age as of affection; and it is singular how little such sympathy can be traced in their genius or works. When, on the other hand, we contrast the placid features which Vannucci uniformly limned, rarely ruffled by sorrow, never clouded by sin, with the furious mien and restless energy of Michael Angelo's creations, we may well credit Vasari's story of their quarrel, and can account for the scrimp justice accorded to the painter of Città della Pieve by his Florentine biographer. They pretend not, indeed, to the bold character of Signorelli, nor even to the severity of Mantegna, or Piero della Francesca; but those who criticise them as stiff, timid, and monotonous, in contrast with the performances of the next generation, would arrive at more just conclusions did they include in the comparison those painters who had preceded him, and whose example was his early guide.
Let us turn to Urbino. Lanzi tells us that Giotto, Gentile da Fabriano, and their respective followers, left works in that little capital; where Pungileone has shown that Ottaviano Nelli exercised his profession from 1428 to 1433, and Paolo Uccello of Florence in 1468, with other artists detected by the same zealous antiquary. Of such works, however, nothing can now be traced. The oldest paintings I could discover there were those in the oratory of St. John Baptist by Lorenzo and Giacomo di San Severino, Lanzi's blunders regarding whom have been corrected by the Marchese Ricci. The principal composition is the Crucifixion, with a dramatic action influenced by Giottesque feeling: the three other walls seem to have been occupied by a history of the titular saint, two passages of which are almost destroyed. Those remaining, though not exempt from retouching, are sufficiently preserved to enable us to detect a masterly and novel arrangement, and a character of devotion more consistent with the Umbrian manner, though marred by hard colouring. The date 1416 is added to the painter's epigraph. We learn from an old chronicle that Antonio da Ferrara painted the Montefeltro chapel in the church of S. Francesco in 1430, a fact scarcely reconcileable with Vasari's assertion that he was a pupil of Angelo Gaddi. He is also said to have executed an ancona for the church of S. Bernardino, portions of which may probably be recognised in some figures still in the sacristy. In that of S. Francesco at Mercatello, among several memorials of a similar period, are {1843} two frescoes characterised by grand design, ample draperies, and full colouring, but deficient in delicacy. The lunette of the marriage of St. Catherine outside the door is somewhat later, and very superior, and may be from the pencil of Pietro della Francesca. Of none of these works, nor of two good panel pictures in the same church, have I been able to find any account. In the hospital of S. Angelo in Vado is a panel altar picture in utter ruin, which has possessed surpassing beauty. The martyrdom of St. Sebastian is there powerfully conceived, and executed with the finest feeling. The inscription seems to have been, Hieronymus Nardia Vicentis fecit; the date probably towards the close of the fifteenth century. Such is the beggarly account we have to offer of early art in the country of Raffaele, and thus might we dismiss the speculations of those who would fondly trace its primary influences on his dawning genius.
But though time and whitewash have combined to narrow this branch of our inquiry, we must not overlook an artist who ranks high among the reformers of painting, and upon whom the patronage of Duke Federigo was specially lavished. His family name has not come down to us, but he is generally known by the matronymic of Piero della Francesca, from the Christian name of his mother, though sometimes designed Pietro del Borgo, or Il Borghese, from Borgo S. Sepolcro, his native town. His life has unfortunately been left in much obscurity by his only biographer Vasari, who might have well bestowed somewhat more pains upon the career of one born in a neighbouring town, who left his finest works at Arezzo, and whose merits he is more inclined to magnify than to slight. The loose assertions of this author have been adopted by most succeeding writers, without addition and with little investigation; but of the school in which Pietro acquired the rudiments of his art, and of the earlier period of his career, we remain still uninformed, though his age and Apennine origin favour the conjecture that he may have imbibed his first lessons from works of Ottaviano Nelli the contemporary Umbrian master.[*142] Beyond question two very different manners appear in the productions of his pencil; the first, crudely composed and laboriously frittered into detail, with much of the contracted ideas and bright tinting of the old miniaturists; the second, broad and masterly in conception, and executed with a flowing pencil, though retaining an elaborate finish. Both styles are united in a little picture at Urbino, which we shall presently describe, the Flagellation being in the earlier, the three portraits in the larger manner. If born, as Vasari incorrectly states, in the last years of the fourteenth century,[*143] Piero, instead of being patronised by Guidobaldo I., must have reached at least eighty-four in that Duke's time; indeed, he would have been past middle life ere Federigo, whom, as we shall presently see, he calls his chief patron, succeeded to that state in 1443. "Guidobaldo Feltro" may, however, probably be a mistake of Vasari for Count Guidantonio, in which case a solution would be afforded for several of his manifold contradictions; and at that court, if not in earlier life, our artist might have been the associate or pupil of Nelli. Passing over works now lost which del Borgo is stated on the same authority to have executed at Pesaro, Ferrara, Ancona, and Loreto, we find him called by Nicholas V. to Rome, where his frescoes appear to have been destroyed in the many alterations made on the Vatican Palace before that century closed.
Piero della Francesca is also asserted by Vasari to have been one of the most profound mathematicians of his day, and to have improved perspective and the management of light by an adaptation of geometrical principles to painting. The latter of these opinions has been received, and constitutes the highest claim of this master upon the historians of art. The point has not as yet been illustrated by any writer competent to pronounce with accuracy upon such pretensions,[*144] but the merit of having shown how to ameliorate perspective, especially in architectural design, is generally granted to Piero. Pascoli and others have regarded him as its father. Lanzi thinks him the first who revived the ancient Greek notion of rendering geometry subject to painting in general, although Brunelleschi, Paolo Uccelli, and others had already applied the same principles with less science to architectural details; and he combats the priority in these respects asserted by Lomazzo for Foppa of Brescia. The claims of Leon Battista Alberti,[*145] the architect, seem to have been settled by Vasari's opinion that distance was better described by his pen than delineated by his pencil. The same author enlists our sympathy in favour of Il Borghese, representing him as defrauded of his fame by an unscrupulous scholar, Fra Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan, who, after learning from him mathematics, availed himself of his instructor's after blindness to plagiarise his manuscripts, and eventually published them as his own.[*146] Into this controverted matter we need not enter, further than to pronounce with Tiraboschi, Rosini, and Gaye a verdict of not proven, and to observe that the celebrity attained by the friar's scientific works ought to reflect some merit upon his instructor. Yet justice to both parties requires us to extract the generous testimony volunteered to the painter by his pupil, in dedicating to Duke Guidobaldo his Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, &c.: "Perspective, if closely looked into, would certainly be nothing without the aid of geometry, as has been fully demonstrated by Pietro di Franceschi, our contemporary, and the prince of modern painting. During his assiduous service in your Excellency's family, he composed his short treatise on the art of painting and the power of linear perspective, which is now deservedly placed in your library, rich with books in every branch." These, surely, are not the words of a literary pirate; indeed, Vasari's whole account is vague and confused. After telling us that Pacioli had appropriated the matter of Piero's many MSS., then existing at Borgo San Sepolcro, he adds that most of his writings were deposited in the Urbino library, where it is obvious that neither he nor those who have repeated his assertions ever sought them. After every possible search, I have reason to believe that that library now contains but two treatises by Il Borghese, nor have I found any evidence of others having ever been there. Both are in Latin, and are fairly transcribed on vellum in contemporary hands, with diagrams upon the margin.[147] The former is entitled De Perspectiva, but the subject is, in fact, Light,[*148] and its effect upon objects and colours. In place of a general title, it sets out with a dictum that "light is to philosophical inquiry what demonstrative certainty is to mathematics." The volume, bearing the arms and initials of Duke Federigo, must have been written for his library: though anonymous, it is clearly the work referred to in a dedication which we shall presently quote, the only other MS. upon perspective in the collection being that by Vitellioni (No. 265).
The other volume has for title Petri Pictoris Burgensis de Quinque Corporibus Regularibus. The five bodies discussed in it are, the triangle of four bases, the cube with six faces, the octagon with eight faces and as many triangles, the duodecahedron with twelve faces and as many pentagons, the icosahedron with twenty faces and as many triangles. We shall extract from the dedication to Guidobaldo I. a passage relating to the essay and its author: "And as my works owe whatever illustration they possess solely to the brilliant star of your excellent father, the most bright and dazzling orb of our age, it seemed not unbecoming that I should dedicate to your Majesty this little work, on the five regular bodies in mathematics, which I have composed, that, in this extreme fraction of my age, my mind might not become torpidly inactive. Thus may your splendour reflect a light upon its obscurity: and your Highness will not spurn these feeble and worthless fruits, gathered from a field now left fallow, and nearly exhausted by age, from which your distinguished father has drawn its better produce; but will place this in some corner, as a humble handmaid to the numberless books of your own and his copious library, near our other treatise on Perspective, which we wrote in former years. For it is usual to admit, at the most luxurious and festive banquets, fruits culled by a rude and unpolished peasant. Indeed, its novelty may ensure its proving not unpleasing; for though the subject was known from Euclid and other geometers, it is now [first] applied by me to arithmetical science. At all events, it will be a token and memorial of my long-cherished attachment and continual devotion to yourself and your illustrious house."
This must have been written after 1482, when, if Vasari's dates be accurate, Piero was at least eighty-four years old, and had been blind during five lustres; a circumstance which, though not entirely inconsistent with his cultivation of the exact sciences, would occasion an impediment not likely to be passed over by him, when pleading as an apology the disabilities of age. The researches of Abbé Pungeleoni have, however, established that no such calamity had befallen our painter in 1469, when he was the guest of Giovanni Sanzi, at Urbino; and it is no way referred to in Pacioli's dedication, written in 1494, while he was still alive. Altogether, it may be questioned whether that alleged bereavement was not one of Vasari's many inaccuracies, the most valuable portion of whose account of this master is a notice of the frescoes executed by him in the choir of S. Francesco, at Arezzo, wherein are depicted the Discovery and Exaltation of the true Cross, and the Vision and Victory of Constantine. These noble works, uniting a happy application of his favourite studies on perspective and light, with a grandeur and movement unknown to most of his compositions, are now mere wrecks,[*149] in which, however, may be traced not a few ideas subsequently appropriated by more celebrated artists. The most remarkable of them is the Vision, the original drawing for which has been published by Mr. Young Ottley. In the play of light and the management of chiaroscuro, there is far more profound study than was usual among his contemporaries, and in no other work of so early a date have these been as successfully treated. By a not very intelligible juxtaposition, the companion compartment is occupied by an Annunciation, grave, solemn, almost severe, as are most of his later paintings. The lowest and largest space on either side of the choir, is filled by the Battle, whilst Constantine prays in a corner, surrounded by his courtiers. These may have suggested to Raffaele the same subject for the Stanze, but they afford no details calculated to animate his pencil. Soldiers, horses, and banners are, indeed, mingled together with a bustle and energy of action hitherto unattempted; but the effect is neutralised by an all-prevailing confusion, and by a want of groups or episodes to concentrate the spectator's scattered interest or admiration. The design is generally good; the modelling and character of the heads are, as usual, excellent; the costumes are richly varied; and the horses remind us, by their action, of Pisano's pictures and medals. If it be true that Raffaele has repeated some of the noble ideas here freely lavished, it seems more probable that, in his Liberation of St. Peter, he wished to excel the tent scene, than that he bore in mind the crowded men-at-arms when composing the Victory of Constantine. The elements have conspired against this chef-d'œuvre of Pietro del Borgo. Its walls were frightfully riven during last century by an earthquake, and its menacing cracks have since been shaken by thunderbolts. Although the repairs have been judiciously limited to securing the plaster, without attempting any restoration of the frescoes, several compartments are almost wholly defaced. Some female groups, however, remain, which yield to nothing that Masaccio has left for the plaudits of posterity.
In much better preservation is a hitherto unnoticed painting on the wall of a chapel in the cathedral of Rimini, dated 1448. It represents Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, whom we have so often named in the [first volume] of this work, kneeling in prayer before his patron saint, Sigismondo, king of Hungary. The wide and once beautifully graduated landscape has unfortunately suffered; but the favourite dog,[*150] crouching behind, is evidently as striking a likeness as his master, whose dignified character and serious pose give to what is but a laboriously accurate portrait, the spiritualised grandeur of a noble devotional composition. It embodies the verity of nature, exempt from the vulgarity of naturalism.
We have to lament the disappearance of whatever works in fresco Pietro del Borgo may have executed for Urbino, unless we attribute to him, on an already noticed lunette over the outer doorway of S. Francesco, at Mercatello, a beautiful half-length Marriage of St. Catherine. Of the small pictures, which he is said by Vasari to have painted for that court, one only remains; it is in the sacristy of the Urbino cathedral, and is a monument of great interest as regards the master and his patrons. On one side is the Flagellation of Christ before Pilate, in an open court enriched with a beautiful perspective of colonnades and architectural ornament. On the other is introduced a detached group of three figures in conversation, magnificently attired, who are generally called at Urbino the successive sovereigns Oddantonio, Federigo, and Guidobaldo I.; but their ages, compared with that of the painter, are irreconcileable with such a supposition. The Abbé Pungeleoni, in his Life of Sanzi, considers them to represent Count Guidantonio and his successors, Oddantonio and Federigo; or they may more probably be portraits of Oddantonio and the two evil counsellors who led him and themselves to destruction, as narrated in our [third chapter].[151] In the graphic character and fine modelling of their features is displayed one of those peculiar excellences which Il Borghese was able, from his knowledge of perspective and light, to introduce into the practice of pictorial art, and which he is said to have carried out by making finished figures of clay, and draping them with various materials. This precious little picture is signed Opus Petri de Borgo Sci. Sepulcri, and we have already quoted it as illustrative of both his first and second manner. I have been so fortunate as to trace three more of the Urbino pictures of this master, hitherto unnoticed. At the devolution of the duchy to the Holy See, they found their way into the possession of Urban VIII., and now adorn the private apartment of his successor, Prince Barberini, at Rome, where they pass under the name of Mantegna. The first, a portrait of Duke Federigo and his son, has been already described. Having been executed about 1478, when Guidobaldo was five or six years old, and when the painter, according to Vasari, was above eighty, it would afford conclusive evidence against the hitherto received date of Pietro's birth.[152] The other two are companion pictures, and though hung too high, appear in excellent preservation. Both are architectural designs on panel, one representing the court of a palace, the other a basilicon-like interior, with elaborate plastic decorations and very clever perspective; a variety of figures are introduced, but the subjects are not known.[*153] To these, and still more to some of his earlier productions, may be applied the observation of Fra Castiglione, that "the works of Pietro, and those of his contemporary, Melozzo da Forlì, with their perspective effects and intricacies of art, are appreciated by connoisseurs rather than admired by the uninitiated."[*154]