Perugino

by Selwyn Brinton

PLATE II.—ST. SEBASTIAN
(In the Musée du Louvre, Paris)

[Perugino painted this Saint many times, there being more than six different renderings still existing. The picture reproduced here is one of the best, both in the modelling of the nude and the sentiment of the figure and the lovely Umbrian landscape. It came (in 1896) from the Sciarra Colonna Gallery. Underneath the figure will be seen the words, Sagittē tuē infixē sunt michi.]

But at Florence he must certainly have been in these years, going there (as the author I have just quoted suggests) "soon after 1470," probably, for a time at least, within Verrocchio's workshop, and drinking in all the glorious message of Florentine art in the company of the younger generation of her craftsmen, among whom Giovanni Santi, in his rhyming chronicle of art, mentions directly another pupil of Verrocchio, the young Leonardo da Vinci, as his friend and associate:

"Due giovin par d'etate e par d'amori
Leonardo da Vinci e'l Perusino
Pier della Pieve...."

That he must have been already advanced in his art in those days is borne out by the fact that only ten years later (1481) he was summoned by Pope Sixtus to Rome, to decorate, in the company of the great Florentine masters—Ghirlandajo, Cosimo Rosselli, and Botticelli—the walls of the "Sistine" Chapel in fresco. Prior to this great commission, Milanesi notes (1475) frescoes painted by him in the great hall of the Perugian Palazzo Pubblico, which have entirely disappeared, and others (1478) in a chapel at Cerqueto, of which only a "St. Sebastian," very Umbrian in character, now survives.

"Whence it came about," says Vasari, "that the fame of Pietro was so spread abroad within Italy and without that, to his great glory, he was brought by Pope Sixtus to work at Rome in his chapel, in company with other excellent craftsmen: in the which place he made the story of Christ where he gives to St. Peter the keys, and likewise the 'Nativity' and 'Baptism of Christ' and the 'Finding of Moses' ... and on the side where is the altar the mural painting of the 'Assumption of Madonna,' wherein he drew Pope Sixtus on his knees. But these last-mentioned works were destroyed to make room for the 'Last Judgment' of the divine Michelangelo, in the time of Pope Paul III." Vasari here refers to the wall paintings in fresco of the "Nativity," "Finding of Moses," and "Assumption." All these have disappeared without a trace.

There remain the magnificent "Delivery of the Keys" and the frescoes of the "Journey of Moses" and the "Baptism of Christ." I made a careful study of these last two frescoes at Rome ten years ago, when writing the life of Pinturicchio, and that study led me to the conclusion that here we have Pinturicchio working under Perugino himself. "The Moses, for instance," I wrote of the "Journey of Moses in Egypt," "who appears here is thoroughly Peruginesque (he is to be compared with the Christ and the Baptist in the fresco opposite), but is painted probably by Pinturicchio under Perugino's instructions. The Zipporah, too, when she is seen advancing, or again where the child in her lap undergoes the rite of circumcision, and the female attendant in white in the corner of the fresco are creations of Vannucci's very type and mould. The beautiful landscape, however, with its palm-trees and overhanging rocks, is thoroughly in Pinturicchio's manner, and the fresco is full of grouped portraits—a Florentine trait.... Now, if we turn about, we can examine the fresco opposite (right wall next the altar) of the 'Baptism of Christ': here again I find the two Umbrians to have been working in collaboration. In support of this attribution it is interesting to compare the 'Baptism' here with the undoubted 'Baptism' by Perugino at Foligno. I have seen both the Foligno painting and that of the Sistina this month, and have photographs of each before me as I correct these notes; and I find the two groups absolutely identical save for the slight variations in type and drapery of the St. John, caused, as I think, by his having been painted by Pinturicchio, but under the elder master's guidance."

I have here quoted from my notes, written within the Sistine Chapel itself, at some length, because they lead me to some extent to differ from the conclusions of Senator Morelli, who, insisting on the poetry of Pinturicchio's landscapes, is disposed to give both these frescoes to that great master. Pinturicchio was undoubtedly working in Rome as Perugino's assistant during this pontificate of Pope Sixtus. Crowe and Cavalcaselle say of this artist: "He was a Perugian by birth and education, had followed with moderate talent the lessons of Buonfigli and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and afterwards joined the atelier of Perugino. He had all the qualities that should be sought in a subordinate, and might have become indispensable to one who undertook large commissions and required an orderly superintendent for his apprentices. It was natural that Perugino should take him into partnership and give him a third of his profits. Nor do the Sixtine frescoes discountenance the belief that the two men stood in this relation to each other in 1484."

When Perugino left Rome for Florence in 1486, Pinturicchio remained there, obtained commissions from the great families of the Della Rovere and Cibo, and from the Borgia Pope Alexander VI., for whom he decorated the famous "Appartamento Borgia" within the Vatican. He thus began to assume the position of an independent master; but if we trace his hand (especially in the children and landscape backgrounds) in the two Sistine wall paintings which I have just mentioned—though working still under the elder master's supervision and assistance—it is Perugino alone who comes before us, in his full strength, in the "Delivery to St. Peter of the Keys." The subject, it has been well said, was a simple incident, but demanded "from the deep meaning attached to it as related to the history of the Roman church a certain grandeur and solemnity of treatment"; and here at once we see the full influence upon Pietro of his Florentine training, combined, in a very interesting way, with those earlier Umbrian elements which still remained with him as the strongest impulse, and which he had learnt from his earlier Perugian master, or later, not improbably, from the great Piero della Francesca. No writer upon Umbrian art can afford to neglect its wonderful landscape backgrounds, often poetic and fantastic, as in the art of Pinturicchio, but always with this sense of roominess, of vastness, and spaciousness, which Mr. Berenson has very happily defined by the phrase of "space-composition"; and, writing of this very fresco in an earlier work, I compared within the Sistina the crowded frescoes and stir of movement of Botticelli or Cosimo Rosselli with those wide spaces of Perugino's "Granting of the Keys," where our eyes are carried onwards from the central group far away to the distant temple with its roomy porticoes.

But if the background with its Bramantesque temple and the middle distance is still purely Umbrian, and seems to foreshadow the "Sposalizio" at Caen, or at the Brera, in those noble figures grouped upon the front plane of the composition—many of them obviously contemporary portraits (one of them in a skullcap being suggested as the master himself)—we may trace the dominant influence of the great Florentines, of Masaccio within the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, and of the noble fresco art of Domenico Ghirlandajo. And thus Pietro Perugino combines within himself already the two most important currents of the art of the Italian Renaissance—that art of Florence, with its intellectualism, its masterly drawing, its sense of form, and that lovely devotional spirit of Umbrian art, developed and inherited from the earlier Sienese. He is at least for us here the precursor—the "forerunner"; and what his divinely gifted pupil, the young Raphael of Urbino, was to complete he already foreshadows.