Rafaelle Sanzio of Urbino had lost his mother, Magia Ciarla, in 1491, and his father, Giovanni Santi, three years later. It was not long after this that he was placed by his relatives for instruction in Perugino's famous workshop at Perugia, and we may safely assume that he was there during part of the master's richly creative period which we have just traversed, and that his hand was busied, along with those of other pupils, in the paintings of the frescoes of the Sala del Cambio.

Among these pupils Vasari mentions, beside Rafaelle, the Florentines—Rocco Zoppo, Baccio, and Francesco Ubertino (the latter best known by his surname of Bacchiacca), Giovanni di Pietro (called Lo Spagna), Andrea di Luigi (called L'Ingegno), Eusebio di San Giorgio, Benedetto Caporali, and others. We have already noted Bernardino di Betto, called Pinturicchio, as his assistant, and later as a sort of partner and superintendent of these young apprentices; and there seems little doubt that, after the completion of the Cambio frescoes and Perugino's subsequent return to Florence, Pinturicchio took young Rafaelle with him to Siena, as an assistant in his great commission there (1502) to decorate the library of Cardinal Piccolomini. In Perugino the brilliant but most assimilative young student found just the master he needed. He would have been crushed under the masterful force, the relentless nudities, of such a master as Luca Signorelli, whereas in Pietro's devotional art, with its accurate training in drawing, colour, and perspective, his sunny nature found room to expand, and his first visit to Florence (1504) proved as inspiring to him as it had been to his master.

Meanwhile that busy master, his decorative commission of the Sala del Cambio completed, had gone back at once to purely religious art in a great painting for the high altar at Vallombrosa, which is now in the Florence Accademia. The subject is the Assumption of Mary Virgin, who appears in a mandorla surrounded by angels, while God the Father bends to bless from heaven, and four saints on earth beneath await in adoration. This was probably painted at the monastery, for Vasari says distinctly, "At Vallombrosa he painted a picture for the high altar"; and this is quite likely, as well as that his two grand profile portraits of the Abbot Baldasarre and of Don Biagio Milanesi date from the same visit.

We have already noticed his finely virile portrait of Francesco delle Opere in the Uffizi collection, and this, combined with the two monastic portraits just mentioned, now in the Florentine Accademia, proves that, if our master had devoted himself to portrait work, he might have been one of the greatest portraitists of all time. In the two last portraits the technique is of extreme simplicity. It is simply the bare shaven head, seen in profile against a brown background. But the drawing is faultless, the man himself is there, and there is not a touch more than is needed to reveal the bones of the skull beneath an upper surface covering of flesh and skin.

The Vallombrosan altar-piece dates from 1500, and in 1501 Perugino was one of the Priors (Priori), and, being obliged to reside in the Communal Palace and give the most of his time to magisterial and civic duties, he probably had little time left for painting. But he took occasion to contract for future work (1502)—for saints and angels to be painted around a fine crucifix in wood for the Convent of S. Francesco al Monte, which is now in the Perugian Gallery; for designs for the intarsia work of S. Agostino, and a double altar-piece for the same church, as well as a Sposalizio (Marriage of Mary) for the Duomo.

In 1503 we have seen that Pietro had returned to Florence, and taken lodgings in the Pinti quarter. There followed the quarrel with Michelangelo which I have mentioned, and very shortly after this he left Florence again for Perugia. While here, he received a letter from the Priors of his birthplace, CittÀ della Pieve, inviting him to paint a fresco there. This was on February 20, 1504, and, after some correspondence as to terms, in March following the contract was concluded, and the fresco painted in the same year. The subject of this fine fresco is the Adoration of the Magi. Hidden away in its little township, it is not easily accessible to visitors, and escaped the plunder of the French. I have not yet been able to visit it, but my friend Dr. G. C. Williamson, who drove to CittÀ across the mountains from Perugia, was deeply impressed by the painting and the place, and writes, "The town is strangely beautiful—like a petrified city, left high and dry by the moving waters of civilisation, untouched and unspoiled." At Panicale, another township near there, is a St. Sebastian by our master, signed and dated 1505. These were works which he probably painted rapidly and for a comparatively low price—the Pieve Adoration having been reduced to seventy-five florins—and Crowe and Cavalcaselle trace the hand of his assistant, Lo Spagna, in the Panicale St. Sebastian and an Assumption in that city.

But Perugino had by no means abandoned Florence as yet, for we find him writing from there in June of 1505 to the Marchioness of Mantua to acknowledge the receipt of eighty ducats for his tempera painting of the "Combat of Love and Chastity."

Isabella d'Este da Gonzaga, Marchioness of Mantua, an enthusiastic collector and art patron, and one of the most cultivated women of her time, was at that moment forming within her palace at Mantua the famous Studio della Grotta, which she adorned with paintings by Mantegna, Costa, and Perugino. These paintings, which I have described in my own work on Mantua, and elsewhere, were still in the Grotta in 1627, but after the terrible sack of Mantua in 1630 they were sold to Cardinal Richelieu, and are now in the MusÉe du Louvre. They were all of allegorical subjects, dictated by the Marchesa herself, and the "Parnassus" of her court painter, Andrea Mantegna, is a masterpiece. But that of the Perugian master is far less satisfactory, and was indeed found so by that very keen critic, the Marchesa Isabella herself. She wrote to him on June 30 of the year 1505: "The picture has reached me safely, and, as it is well drawn and coloured, pleases me; but if it had been more carefully finished, it would have been more to your honour and our satisfaction." She here goes straight to the point in noting—as we shall do later—that the master was becoming careless and hasty in his execution. On the other hand, it is fair to remember that the subject was not probably congenial, that he was tied hand and foot in his treatment by the learned lady's written instructions (on hearing that he had represented Venus as nude, she declared that if one single figure were altered the whole fable would be ruined), and it is only in the wide sweep of clear sky and hills and river that the artist really finds himself again.

Another commission of this time in Florence was to complete the Descent from the Cross begun in 1503 by Filippino Lippi, and left unfinished at his death in 1505. This picture, which was destined for the SS. Annunziata at Florence, was completed by Perugino, and is now in the Accademia. The lower portion is here by our master, and, considering the initial difficulty of working upon another man's conception, the result is to be praised. Crowe, indeed, calls the Virgin fainting in the arms of the three Maries one of the noblest conceptions of his brush. But the same cannot be said of his joint commission of the Assumption, painted also for the SS. Annunziata in this summer of 1505. Dr. Williamson, whose monograph I have already mentioned, and who went to the pains of visiting all these works of Perugino scattered by Napoleon through the small provincial museums of France, noted that the resemblance between the Assumption and the Ascension of Lyons, which had been painted in 1495 for S. Pietro at Perugia, is so close as to show the artist had hardly troubled to make any change. Not only this, but the Coronation of the Virgin, of the Perugian Gallery, shows groups identical with both the above paintings, and this Assumption, for which, as Crowe says, "he fell back on the model of the Lyons Ascension," is painted in a slovenly and careless manner.

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.

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.

"As the aged artist," says Crowe, "laboured at Fontignano, industrious to the close, a plague broke out in the Perugia district and ravaged the country. A disgraceful panic over-spread the land. It was decreed that the ceremonies of religion should be omitted in all cases where death ensued from the contagion. Perugino died and was buried in a field at Fontignano ... and no one knows where lie the bones of Pietro Perugino." Later documentary evidence, which is quoted by the above authors, and at greater length by Milanesi in his edition of "Vasari's Lives," has here overthrown the statement by Vasari that "Pietro, having come to the age of seventy-two years, ended the course of his life in Castello della Pieve, where he was honourably buried in the year 1524." We know now that his sons (1524) endeavoured to have their father's body brought from his hasty burial-place to be interred in S. Agostino at Perugia; but, in the disturbed state of central Italy during this epoch of foreign invasion, the pious wish was never fulfilled.

When we think with what care and expense Pietro had once prepared his last resting-place in S. Maria de' Servi at Florence, this tragedy of his unknown and hurried burial seems the more sad. He survives in his art; and that is a complete vindication, an undying memorial. In these pages we have traced his progress from his first great commission of the Sistine Chapel, with its dignified grouping and sense of air and space, through the tender beauty of his altar-pieces, the simplicity and breadth of his fresco work—the Nativity of the Villa Albani, the Crucifixion of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, the PietÀ of the nuns of S. Chiara, the altar-piece of the Certosa of Pavia—till, in his great decorative commission at Perugia of the Sala del Cambio, in the year 1500, he seemed to reach the summit of his creative power, and climb down from thence, though by no means immediately or conclusively, to these faded and yet exquisite frescoes, with which, in his own fading years, he wreathed the little hill-cities of his native Umbria. And we noted him as a complete master of his art, even though he might willingly abide within a certain religious convention; we saw that the master of the Delivery of the Keys within the Sistine, the great portrait artist, whose hand has left us those forceful heads of Francesco delle Opere, of the Abbot Baldasarre, and Don Biagio, the painter of the Albani and Certosa altar-pieces, the decorator of the Cambio, had nothing to fear in his powers of art creation from the very greatest of his time.

But after we have said all this, we must own that his special place within that galaxy of genius of the greatest Italian art is best described by a writer to whose appreciative criticism I have always given my sincere admiration; for Pietro's task it was "to create for the soul amid the pomps and passions of this world a resting-place of contemplation, tenanted by saintly and seraphic beings. No pain comes near the folk of his celestial city; no longing poisons their repose; they are not weary, and the wicked trouble them no more. Their cheerfulness is no less perfect than their serenity; like the shades of Hellas, they have drunk LethÆan waters from the river of content, and all remembrance of things sad or harsh has vanished from their minds.... In the best work of Perugino, the Renaissance set the seal of absolute perfection upon pietistic art."

"Masterpieces in Colour" Series

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