Nothing ever happens in Città della Pieve. The town has fallen on sleep in its delightful landscape—on sleep as silent and profound as that of all the fossil shells in the banks along the roads which lead to it. But the place is strangely and marvellously beautiful; it holds the very essence of that intense religious charm peculiar to the landscapes of Umbria, and to the painters who have painted them; without exaggeration, we may say that the city looks to-day just exactly as it looked over four hundred years ago, at the time when, to the lovers of art, its history began and ended.[86]
Pietro Vannucci de Castro Plebis detto il Perugino, was born at Città della Pieve in the year 1446. His parents were very poor, but they were of a good family and position. There were many children, and life was a struggle for bread in the small boy’s home. When he was about eight, his father, Christoforo Vannucci, decided to educate him as a painter, and so he brought him to the city of Perugia, and there, as Vasari says, “this child, who had been reared in penury and want, was given as a shop drudge to a painter who was not particularly distinguished in his calling, but who held the art in great veneration, and highly honoured the men who excelled therein.” The painter was probably Bonfigli, one of the most delightful artists of the Umbrian school, but Pietro must have gathered instruction from other sources too, from Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and Piero della Francesca, who we know were painting at that time. Maybe the boy met them at their work in churches, maybe he even travelled with them as a sort of journeyman. But it was probably Bonfigli who early inspired him with an ambitious desire to spread his wings in higher spheres of art than the little Umbrian town afforded him, and who gave him the worldly-wise advice retailed to us at some length by Vasari: Perugino must go to Florence,
“for the air of that city generates a desire for glory and honour, and gives a natural quickness to the perceptions of men. Yet it is true that when a man has acquired sufficient for his purposes in Florence, if he wishes to effect more than merely to live from day to day, as do the beasts that perish, and desires to become rich, he must depart from its boundaries and seek another market for the excellence of his works and for the reputation conferred on artists by that city. For the city of Florence treats her painters as Time treats her works, which, having perfected, he destroys, and by little and little gradually consumes.”
Pietro listened to these naïve counsels; he drank them in and he followed them out to the letter. When quite a young man he started across the hills to Florence. He probably travelled as a journeyman, begging or earning his bread along the way. He reached Florence, entered the studio of Andrea Verrocchio, buried himself in a passionate study of his art, and, barely ten years after the date when, as an almost unknown artist, he had entered Florence with the secret of his genius in his soul, he left it again to go to Rome and paint a portion of the Sistine Chapel at the command of the reigning pope. Pietro studied in good schools and in excellently good society. In Florence he probably met with men like Botticelli, Credi, and certainly Leonardo da Vinci. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, is said to have written the following lines about the two young painters:
“Due giovan par d’etate e par d’amore
Lionardo da Vinci, e ’l Perusino
Pier della Pieve, ch’è un divin pittore.”
Divine in truth were the two young men, for they were to be the fathers of the Lombard and the Umbrian schools of painting.
Perugino’s earliest commissions for pictures were received in Florence, but nearly all the work of that period is lost. We cannot exaggerate the loss, but it is useless now to dwell on it and to describe the vanished frescoes of the Gesuati convent. Pietro was
