When we remember what Florence was in this early sixteenth century—a city keenly intellectual, alive to art as perhaps no city, save Athens, has ever been before or since, and highly critical and censorious—we need not be surprised that the master, thus openly convicted of plagiarism from his earlier works and of careless technique, was censured by his friends and attacked by his enemies. Vasari tells us that "when the aforesaid work" (the Assumption) "was uncovered, it was freely blamed by all the younger craftsmen, and, in particular, because Pietro had made use of those figures which had already appeared in his other works; and his friends replied that it was not that his powers had failed, but that he had acted so either from greed of money or from haste. To whom Pietro answered: 'I have put into this work the figures praised before by you, and with which you were infinitely pleased. If now they displease you and are not praised, what can I do to help it?' But these men continued to assail him with sonnets and public insults. Whence he, already old, left Florence, and returned to Perugia." There is something pathetic in the old man's reply, and it must have cost him a heart-pang to thus turn his back on Florence. He had loved the city, had gained there his first inspiration in art, his first successes, had wedded there, bought a house and property, and purchased in this noble Church of the SS. Annunziata a burial-place for himself and his descendants. But he never returned. His name disappears from the rolls of the painters' guild in Florence, and in 1506 appears in that of Perugia. Umbria welcomed back her great master with reverent appreciation. That divided impulse of his life was ended, and from henceforth he was all her own.
PLATE VIII.—VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH TWO MALE SAINTS
(In the National Gallery, London)
[This fine painting, very individual in treatment, was painted by Pietro in 1507 for the executors of Giovanni Schiavone, a master-carpenter of Perugia.]
[In 1822 Baron delle Penna, by whose family it had been inherited, removed the painting to his palace at Perugia, and thence it passed to the London Gallery in 1879.]
Always a good man of business, Perugino's first step on reaching Perugia was to collect the debts still due to him. From the authorities of Città della Pieve he demanded the balance (March of 1507) of 25 florins, which was liquidated by the conveyance of a house, from Panicale 11 florins, and for his work in the Cambio he drew 350 ducats. Then the commissions began to come in again, and an altar-piece of this very time (1507), representing Madonna between SS. Jerome and Francis, has recently come to the London National Gallery from the Palazzo Penna at Perugia, and is a work of charm and great merit. It had been ordered in 1507 by the executors of Giovanni Schiavone, a master-carpenter of Perugia, to be set over the altar of a chapel in S. Maria de' Servi in that city. This work completed, he left for Foligno, where I found still in place his fresco of The Baptism of Christ in the Church of La Nunziatella, and from Foligno (1507-8) he was summoned by Pope Julius to Rome to decorate the ceilings of his Vatican Palace. Bazzi (Sodoma) and Peruzzi were already being employed on the same work, and at Rome Perugino met his old friends and rivals in art—Signorelli, Bramantino, and others—and introduced to them his own pupil Caporali. When Rafaelle was accepted by Julius II. as his final and only master in the Vatican, and bidden by the impetuous Pontiff to destroy all work of other artists, he spared—with that gentilezza which was in his character—the ceiling paintings of his old master Perugino, which yet remain to us in the Camera dell' Incendio. But, eclipsed by his brilliant young pupil, there was clearly no room for old Pietro at Rome, and he journeyed northward with Signorelli, breaking his journey to paint a Crucifixion for S. Maria degli Angeli at Assisi, and another painting at Siena of the same subject for the Church of S. Agostino. A fragment which is in the collection of Miss Hertz at Rome may belong to another picture due to this Siena visit; and later we find him painting at Bettona, and (1512-13) in his own birthplace of Città della Pieve.
Vasari has a gossiping story that Pietro, "who trusted no one, and, in going and returning from Castello della Pieve, carried all the money he had about him always on his person," was robbed on the way, and lost his money and nearly his life. And he adds next: "Pietro was a person of very little religion, and could never be made to believe in the immortality of the soul; nay, with words adapted to his evil mind, he did most obstinately refuse every good path. He placed all his hopes in the goods of fortune, and for money would have made every bad contract." There were two reasons why Vasari should have been unfair to Perugino—one, that he was an Umbrian, even though long resident in Florence, the other, that he had come, as we have seen, into collision with his admired Michelangelo. Even so, Vasari is much too good a judge to depreciate his art, but he attacks the Perugian master personally, and his remarks about religion do not count for much. Vasari lived in an age—that of the counter-Reformation—which combined in Italy the lowest level of morals with apparent orthodoxy, and, under the shadow of the Inquisition, religion became a good stone to throw at your enemy. But we cannot say there is nothing behind his charge, because, with regret, we have seen within these pages this master of the tender virgins and calm saints of God as being vindictive (that affair before the Eight with Aulista di Angelo comes to our thought), disloyal, and shifty in his business dealings (here the Orvietans and their Chapel of S. Brizio are an instance), and always consistently keen on getting the best side of a bargain. It does come as something of a shock—at any rate to me—to turn from this serenely devotional art to this record of the man's personality, and we feel inclined to echo the words of Symonds, who asks, "How could such a man have endured to pass a long life in the fabrication of devotional pictures?" The answer perhaps lies in the fact that Pietro did not create this lovely art of devotion, of which he was such a supreme interpreter. He found it all around him, in the aspirations of thousands of prayerful souls, even in the very soil of this land of his, where the Etruscans had once quarried the tombs of their dead, and as an art motive it absorbed his whole feeling. When, later in life, material success came to invade his nature, its influence as a corrosive at once appears in his art creation. The touch of ideal beauty leaves his figures; drawing, colour, composition become mere hasty repetition of his earlier efforts.
And yet we cannot but think of the old master with pleasure, even in these later years, as filling these little hill-towns of Umbria, Bettona, Assisi, Montefalco, Spello, Trevi, most of all his own birthplace, Castello della Pieve, with frescoes which are at least lovely shadows of his greatest works. At Bettona he had painted a St. Anthony, and again in the Church of S. Peter at Città della Pieve, and here, too, in the Church of S. Maria de' Servi is the fragment—but a beautiful fragment—of a ruined Crucifixion. The frescoes of S. Maria Maggiore at Spello (signed and dated 1521), and the Adoration of the Magi in the Church of S. Maria delle Lagrime at Trevi, are important in this late period of his art, as well as perhaps a Nativity in the Church of S. Francesco at Montefalco, which is filled with work of his pupils. But a work of special interest is his completion of the frescoes of his greatest pupil, Rafaelle of Urbino, in the Church of S. Severo at Perugia. Sixteen years had elapsed since Rafaelle in 1505 had, as a youth of brilliant promise, painted the upper fresco, anticipating therein the composition of his great Disputa del Sacramento within the Vatican. Since then he had gone on from strength to strength, and now, in his declining years, his old master was called on to complete his pupil's work. The six saints whom he painted there, beneath Rafaelle's fresco, grouped on either side of terra-cotta figures of the Virgin and Child—SS. Jerome, John, Gregory, and Boniface, with SS. Scolastica and Martha—possess, as far as can be now judged, both dignity and beauty. The fresco is signed by him, and dated with the year of 1521, little more than a year before his death.
For to the last the old man was busy, and after a long life of industry died almost with the brush within his hand. This very year of 1521 he was at Trevi as well as Spello. In 1522 he painted the "Transfiguration" for S. Maria Nuova at Perugia, and his frescoes for the Convent of S. Agnese at Perugia, which are still in place—both the "Transfiguration" and its three predella panels being now in the Perugian Gallery. His last work (1523), the fresco of the Adoration of the Shepherds (a fresco now transferred to canvas), is now in the London National Gallery, where is also his charming Virgin with the little Jesus and St. John, a signed work from the late Mr. Beckford's collection. The child Jesus stands, naked and upright, upon a stone balustrade, and plays with a lock of His mother's hair, who is herself of the pure virginal type imaged by Rafaelle in his earlier creations, notably the famous "Madonna del Granduca"; while the "Adoration," the master's last work, was removed from the Church of Fontignano in 1843. The landscape in both these works—in the Beckford Virgin blue hills and outlined trees, in the Fontignano fresco wide-sweeping uplands—is of great attraction.