We now come to the Adoration of the Magi, which after much dispute was some time ago ascribed to Perugino’s scholar Eusebio di San Giorgio, but which is still the subject of endless local discussions, as, owing to further and more minute investigations it is at length declared by excellent judges to be the work of Raphael. One reason given for this is that the young man to the right of the Virgin has on his trousers a strange design, the arms of Raphael. Poor Eusebio must turn in his grave. His former biographers, anxious to seize on any gem of painting which should save the artist from a rather mediocre position in the history of art, always stayed to shout exultant praises when they came to this picture, and now the critic would tear even this glory from his brows and crown another man whose head is already heavy with their laurels.[101]
No. 20—a Madonna and Child—is ascribed to Raphael. The picture certainly has something of the master in it and it may be the work of the mere boy, when first he came from Urbino to paint with Perugino, and in the Umbrian city dreamed his great Madonna of the future. Raphael Sanzio passes like a dream through Perugia, leaving no certain relic of his mighty fame save one faint faded fresco on the church wall of S. Severo, and these poor relics in the gallery.[102]
Room XII.
Sala di Giannicola e di Berto di Giovanni.
From this point forwards the interest of the gallery begins to wane. We have tracked the dawn and seen the sunrise; now we feel the dull warmth of midday, and passing through the weary hours of the afternoon, most fully and amply represented in the work of the two Alfanis, we pass to night through the fevered rooms of the Decadence. Sala XII. is devoted to the work of Perugino’s scholars, but most of it is weak. Still there is a touch of the old sweetness here and there among the figures. Note No. 15 by Giannicola Manni. It has a charm though it is very imitative. The rest of Giannicola’s work in this room is rather dreary. But there is charm, too, in the purely imitative, nay copied work of Berto di Giovanni. Berto was another of Perugino’s scholars. He lived probably towards the end of the fifteenth century and it is evident that he felt a passionate admiration for his fellow student, Raphael. All we can gather of facts about Berto comes to us through his connection with Raphael. In 1516 he contracted to paint, in combination with his hero, a picture for the nuns of Monteluce. Bits of the predella are now in the Pinacoteca. In the flat and almost womanish sketches of Berto one traces his persistent admiration for the greater artist. It is as though an intelligent child had torn the leaves from its mother’s sketch-book and filled in the lines with faithful and laborious colouring. (See Nos. 19 to 26.) But Berto’s charm, such as it is, went all wrong when he tried to paint big subjects. Nos. 16 and 14 are little more than failures.
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To anyone who admires the work of the two Alfani, Domenico and Orazio, a happy hunting-ground exists in the last big rooms of the Pinacoteca. How it came about that one of Perugino’s really lovely frescoes got hung in this part, we cannot tell, but it is certain that the Nativity (No. 31, Room XIII.) is one of the loveliest things that remain of Pietro in the town of Perugia. It is very like our own Nativity in the National Gallery, faint and fair in colour, calm and true in composition, with a peculiar lilac colour of crushed grapes throughout the dresses and the landscape.
It would be impossible to close any account of the school of Perugino without a slight sketch of the two Alfanis whose intense admiration for the genius of painting became a fault, and who, through their very earnestness preserved the corpse from which the life long since had fled. The Alfanis, Domenico the father, and Orazio the son, had money and long life. These two happy gifts they employed in the paths of art; with these two gifts they at length degraded what they really attempted to exalt. Domenico was such a passionate admirer of Raphael that one of his historians declared him to have died in the same year as Sanzio. Mariotti denies this. “However passionate a friend and inseparable a companion,” he urges, “Domenico had not for certain such a crazy folly as to accompany him to the other world.” Domenico far outlived Raphael. In his long life he absorbed the teaching of many schools, and utterly obliterated his own personality in the work of other people. His son Orazio did the same. They went into partnership, started a large school or studio, and there created the innumerable, rather middle-class pictures, which cover the walls of the Pinacoteca. Grazio survived his father about thirty years, and was the first president of the Academy of Perugia founded in 1573.
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One word to close these notes about the painters of the Umbrian school.