The Story of Perugia

by Margaret Symonds; Lina Duff Gordon

Right away from the town amongst the olive trees we came to the convent of S. Girolamo. There in the back of the choir is the little fresco of the Marriage of the Virgin by Pinturicchio—faint in colour and fragile in outline, but charming in its composition.

Pinturicchio is the painter of Spello; there is much of his work in the churches. He came there to paint for Troilo, one of the Baglioni, lords of Spello. Hence he was called to Siena to do his well-known series of frescoes for the Piccolomini. A whole chapel in S. Maria Maggiore is covered with his works, and he has put his own portrait amongst them with a string of beads, a brush and palette hanging from it. The artist’s face is thin and melancholy, but the frescoes round it are large in line and treatment and some of the best specimens of his religious work. There they stand mouldering mysteriously in the dim light of the little old church for which this master made them four hundred years ago. We lingered long before them, then passed back into the sunlit street and drove away through the gate of the town with the Roman senators above it and out across the hot dry plain to the city of Foligno.[115]

Foligno.[116]

Sunk, as it were, in a broad basin of plain, through which the quiet waters of Clitumnus drain slowly to the Tiber, is the city of Foligno—that city which Perugia so detested, so offended in the past. The town has all the character of the towns of the plain. Driving through its straight and even streets we felt as though we were in Lombardy, in Padua or Ferrara. There were Lombard lions in the porch and Lombard beasts around the arch of the Duomo. The houses were all shut up, square, silent, cool, preparing, as it seemed, for summer heat and dust, and infinite hours of afternoon. The place was flat and drowsy, but we liked it and studied in its churches with delight.

Niccolò Alunno is the painter of Foligno. Some of his work is scattered through the churches, and more is gathered together in the small Pinacoteca together with that of other early Umbrian masters. Very gold and brown the frescoes seemed, very sober and religious in their sentiment. Here one could study the Umbrian school, apart from the Peruginesque, and it struck us that the art of the first Umbrian painters was a natural, and (if one may say so in this age of critics) an inspired one, which sprang straight up from the soil about the feet of the painters, and was only influenced at certain purely decorative points by the teaching of the Florentines. The angels were the Umbrian children, well groomed, well fed, and wholly unaffected. Neither Paganism nor Christianity had very much to do with them. When Perugino’s ripened influence came in, they weakened as garden flowers weaken, in their power of appeal through pure simplicity. The first faces of Umbrian saints and angels were simple like the Umbrian dog-rose. Perugino turned them into garden roses. Both in their way were fair, but the former flowers seemed nearer the divine than those which had been trained and cultivated.

It is not possible to mention here all the pictures of Foligno. There are two fine Alunnos in S. Niccolò; and a rather surprising Mantegna with the colour of brown wine—colour of passion and pain, which clashes with the Perugino just beside it—on the chapel of the Nunziatella. The Palazzo Communale is covered with the work of Nelli, but one feels that the painter who so loved what was gay and rich and beautiful (see his picture at Gubbio) wanted a lot more gold and ultramarine than his patron allowed him when painting the ceiling of this chapel.

Before leaving Foligno we went into the church of S. Maria infra Portas. It is so old, this little low basilica, that it has sunk quite deep into the soil around it. Inside are many faded frescoes, brown and gold, and full of almost painful early sentiment. As we stood among them in the dusk, a blackbird poured a flood of freshest song in through the door from the light of the courtyard. “How your bird sings!” we said to the custode. “Yes,” said the man; “he sings all day; but whether for love or rage I cannot tell.” ... And it struck us that no Umbrian of a hill town, or no Perugian anyway, would have made this profoundly melancholy statement about a tame bird’s song.

Montefalco

The road from Foligno to Montefalco leads all along the flat at first, through the peaceful vale of the Clitumnus. Sometimes we crossed the water and saw the reeds and rushes growing, and felt the cool fresh breath of the enchanted stream. Then passing under a mediæval watch-tower we left the flat land and began the steep ascent to Montefalco.

The town stands on a hill in the very heart of Umbria, and hence it is called by the people the ringhiera d’Umbria. We saw it “on a day of many days,” and it struck us that this was the site of the city of our dreams—the best, the fairest we had ever met in travel. The sun was low as we drove through the gates. Far below us and around us stretched the Umbrian landscape, the bed of the old Umbrian lake: long green waves of blue and green, seething in the heated air of the May afternoon.[117]