An easy-going historian of Perugia summed up the earliest stages of her art in the following sentence: “I have not been able to discover that Perugia had any painters before the time of Bonfigli, but even if she had them, they will not have been worthy of mention.” The assertion was sweeping, and later writers have taken pains to contradict it, but for those who have only time for a superficial and general study of Perugian pictures it yet holds a good deal of truth. No great original work (with the exception of the missal workers, in which style of art Perugia is very rich) is left to us from the hand of a Perugian artist before the time of Bonfigli, and the early history of her art may be said to have been a great deal that of outside influences, for from very early times the best and greatest masters appear, like foreign tribes before them, to have climbed the hill and left some subtle marks upon her churches and her palaces.[94]
As the School of Siena died, that of Umbria awoke to life. Close upon the heels of Taddeo Bartoli, those men followed who were born to precede the School of Perugino. Before them there were around Perugia only phantoms: stiff saints on panels and on parchment, without dates, ghosts of unattained, though dimly felt, ideals—a scattered flock of “primitives,” left here and there on chapel walls or psalters. Then gradually, all through Umbria and her border lands, in a steady circle of glory, like the stars on a summer night, the lights arose and burned. At Gubbio, Camerino, Foligno, Gualdo, Fabriano, and Urbino we trace their steady progress through the work of men like Nelli, Piero della Francesca, Gentile da Fabriano, Niccolò Alunno, and many others. And as these stars arose great comets travelled through them—Giotto, Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Filippo Lippi, and others, till the whole sky was full. Then from the centre, straight from the hill of Città della Pieve—there rose Pietro Perugino, and to his school came one with the halo of pure art upon his forehead,—Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.
The following notes on the Pinacoteca and its pictures may be of use to anyone who requires a few more details than a guide-book can supply. They pretend to be nothing like a serious criticism, for the history of art is long and the books about it full; in most of them the art of Umbria is freely treated. We have gleaned our notes about the painters of Perugia from such sources as Vasari (who, however, is often prejudiced), Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and several local works. Any personal gossip has been drawn from the ever delightful works of Mariotti, whose words, if they be now and then a little antiquated, are as trustworthy as those of a faithful student’s only can be. We have dealt chiefly with the work of the Umbrian painters, and indeed, with the exception of Fra Angelico’s panels and those of some of the Sienese masters, there is little else to study in this small and charming gallery.
The Umbrian School followed close upon that of Siena, and the Gallery of Perugia has some fine bits of Sienese work, notably some panels by Taddeo Bartoli (1363-1422) in Sala IV. This room has some other good panels of early masters—of masters who probably influenced the Perugians, but whose names are lost to us.[95]
Room I.
Sala dei Cimelii.
The first room in the gallery is devoted to the very earliest art of Siena and Umbria, and is one of those rather painful collections of pictures which we find in every local Italian gallery—a room of the primitive painters—which are, as the narrow path of art, beset with many thorns, where only those who passionately love the goal need try to push the briars back and tread the damp and pebbles. But we never forget, though we may even dislike, the pitiful pale figures of the crucified Christ, and the staring wooden saints in triptychs, for in them is shown the strain of technical ignorance, but of ignorance which strives with passionate pain to get beyond itself and soar towards the expression of some deep emotion. This strain and impotent desire is amply shown in the monstrous figure of our Saviour by Magaritone d’Arezzo (see No. 26), which used to hang inside the chapel of S. Bernardino. Such as it is that figure had the seed of art in it, and of an art which, perhaps, had a greater power of appeal to the souls of men and women in pain than all the finished figures of the later painters. No. 28 is an interesting picture, inasmuch as the Bishop whom it represents holds tight to his breast a picture of the old town of Perugia. No. 16 is one of the earliest paintings known in Perugia. It is terribly damaged, and it is difficult to trace the story of the Saint in the battered little panels. These same panels were the first coffin of Beato Egidio (see p. [198]). Sometime after his death a splendid tomb was made for the Saint, which can still be seen in the church of the University, and when the humbler coffin was pulled to pieces, some unknown local painter took the strange fancy to paint on it the history of the man whose bones it had first covered, together with an accurate portrait of his new and lovelier tomb. There are many other pictures in this room, among them (No. 11) an exquisite fragment of some old predella with two small angels on it; and one or two remains of early Sienese work.
Bonfigli.
The room which follows that devoted to the early schools, namely, the Cappella del Bonfigli, is to a student of history one of the most interesting points in the whole gallery, for here, through the frescoes of a most childlike and delightful painter, we live again the life of old Perugia; and here too we stand, face to face, with the authentic work of a man whose celebrity formerly centred round the fact that he was the first master of Perugino, but who, as the years go by, will, doubtless, ever more and more stand on his own feet, and shine because of some strange, subtle and ever-living charm, that of the individual, which clings to all his work.
The Pinacoteca has many of Bonfigli’s works, and no one who once has realised the fashion in which this early Umbrian master crowned his women and his angels will ever be able to forget it. How thin and exquisite the veils upon the pale, calm heads of his Madonnas; how fair and neat the wreaths of roses on the yellow hair of his young angels! Bonfigli was, indeed, a pleasant painter, and it is strange to think that his home relations were of a tempestuous order: “Certainly he had a wife,” says Mariotti, “and he had her of such a sort that she caused him nothing but anxiety; moreover, he was in constant strife with her.” But Bonfigli was not always calm in his painting. He could be humorous, he could have a touch of Carpaccio in him, as will be seen in his frescoes for the Magistrates’ Chapel; but he could also be passionate and dramatic. To understand him fully one must study him in his gonfaloni, or banners. Perugia has five of these—one of S. Bernardino, now in the Pinacoteca, another in the sacristy of S. Francesco al Prato; another in S. Fiorenzo (see p. [232]); the fourth in S. Maria Nuova; and the fifth in S. Lorenzo.[96] All have suffered from exposure and from restoration, but they are unique and individual forms of art. The Christ in them is inexorable and revengeful, Death strives with man, saints and the Madonna try to interfere, and sad and supplicating groups of citizens kneel by their city walls and pray for grace.