Another point which has not been brought out very fully by our master's critics is the predominance of fresco painting in his earlier work. The value of fresco painting to these Italian masters as a training for eye and hand cannot be too much insisted upon. It needed both a sure eye and a quick hand, for the painting had to be done at once when the plaster was ready to receive it; and there can be no doubt that Pietro's absolute mastery, at this period, of this difficult art had prepared him for the wonderful series of altar-pieces in the tempera and oil mediums which we are now about to study.
Perugino, as we have noticed, had returned to Florence in the autumn of 1486, when the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were no doubt completed, and soon after this (1489) received an invitation to visit Orvieto—his altar-piece for S. Domenico at Fiesole having been completed in the year previous. The frescoes in the Capella di S. Brizio within Orvieto Cathedral had been left unfinished through the death of Fra Angelico, and our Perugino, as a master "whose fame had been spread throughout Italy," was now requested to examine the chapel and tender for the completion of its decoration. He did so, but his price was a high one—1500 ducats and all materials to be found him—and we shall trace later how the negotiations, protracted for several years, came eventually to nothing.
PLATE III.—THE DEPOSITION FROM THE CROSS
(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)
[This is the famous painting of the dead Christ for the nuns of S. Chiara, of which Vasari speaks with such enthusiasm, and tells us the nuns were offered (and refused) three times the contract price for the picture.]
[It certainly is a masterpiece of Italian devotional art. It is fully signed and dated—Petrus Perusinus Pinxit A. D. MCCCCLXXXXV.—and there are studies for it in the Uffizi collection of drawings and at Christ Church, Oxford.]
For the moment Florence attracted him, for here, in January of 1491, under the presidency of Lorenzo de' Medici, called the Magnificent, the foremost artists of the day were gathered to consider the decoration of the façade of the Florentine Duomo; and here Perugino was present, beside such masters as Domenico Ghirlandajo, Cosimo Rosselli, Andrea della Robbia, Botticelli, Baldovinetti, Pollajuolo—a long list of names now world-famed in the story of art. From Florence, in March of this same year, our master made his way to Perugia, where he drew the balance of his pay for the Sistine frescoes; and then, prudently avoiding Orvieto, went on south to Rome, where we have seen that Pinturicchio had now established himself, together with the Florentine Filippino Lippi, and had found many commissions.
But Perugino soon found a patron in the Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, later to become famous in history as Pope Julius II.; and this powerful prelate protected our artist from the importunities of the Orvietans, who were pressing him to fulfil his contract, and threatening, if he delayed longer, to appoint another artist in his place. Cardinal Giuliano, the imperious patron later of Michelangelo, took the matter with a characteristically high hand. "We laboured under the impression"—thus he writes to the Council of Orvieto—"that you were to be compliant, as best suits the love we have ever borne to your community. And so we now again exhort and pray that you do reserve the place which is his due to Maestro Pietro, and refrain from molesting him...."
The fact was that the great prelate wanted Pietro for a time for himself, and to this time (1491) belongs the lovely altar-piece, formerly in the Cardinal's Palace, and now in the Villa Albani at Rome. All our master's devotional feeling, his refinement and beauty of type, his wealth of golden colour, is found already in this wonderful altar-piece, which is divided into six compartments, the central panel being occupied by the "Nativity," with above the "Crucifixion" and "Annunciation," and at the sides the figures of four adoring saints. The landscape background is here of extraordinary beauty, reflecting the quiet serenity of the kneeling figures, and on the pillars of the colonnade behind the "Nativity" the master has signed his work—