Lina Duff Gordon

“ ...Parmi de pareilles moeurs, les Âmes se maintiennent vivantes, et le sol est tout labourÉ pour faire germer les arts.

Mais quel contraste entre ces arts et ces moeurs!”

H. Taine, “PÉrouse et Assise,” Voyage en Italie.

THERE is perhaps no gallery in Europe as single-minded—as devoted to one set of men—as the gallery at Perugia. In passing through its separate rooms one feels none of that painful sense of clash and strain produced by a mixture of different schools, which haunts one in so many collections of statues or of pictures; and the most tired and indifferent traveller will feel something soothed and softened in his brain before he turns his back upon the quiet sacred pictures of the Umbrian masters.

In no land perhaps, and in no school of art, was the feeling of the painters more purely and more absolutely religious than in the land of Umbria. The saints were painted for places where saints were worshipped; the Christs have the love of the Father in their faces; the Marys are Mothers of pity and of grace; the bishops have renounced the ways of earth—their faces are calm and grey beneath their mitres. And the Umbrian angels are crowned with roses, but they are the roses of Paradise, and not the flowers of earth and of her banquets. Think of the galleries of Venice, of Bonifazio’s Dives, and the glorious women of Titian; think of the Roman collections, of Bologna and Guercino; nay, even think of the later art of Florence, and then come back to these calm Umbrian masters. The gap is wide; the one is full of the passion and splendour of earth, the other of the sentiment of heaven.

In M. Rio’s chapters on the Umbrian school (l’Art ChrÉtien, vol. ii.), he dwells at length on the purely spiritual tendency of the Umbrian school, and to enforce this he points out two of its most remarkable characteristics; firstly he remarks that the Umbrian painters rarely painted portraits, and secondly, he gives an account of one of their chief products, namely, the painting of the gonfalone or banner.

We have seen in the history how the inhabitants of Perugia, driven to desperation by their own wickedness, would take fits of the most passionate religious revolt, and, casting aside the vanities of the flesh, half kill themselves with cords and stripes and lamentations. This excess of repentance took different forms. Sometimes, as we know, it resulted in an appeal to the saints through wild, mad litanies; at others in an appeal to Christ’s mercy through art; and it was at such times that the Umbrian school, beginning with Bonfigli and ending in works like Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Baroccio’s much later designs, painted the gonfalone, a style of picture which is very typical of Umbria, and which should be looked at with a knowledge of the events from which it first originated. These banners were carried about the city, the priests walking in front, the populace behind, a wail and shriek of lamentation falling on the air as the procession passed. Sometimes, as in the banner of Bonfigli at S. Fiorenzo, a poem of supplication to God would be painted, upheld by angels, on the banner itself, with passionate words of prayer upon it. It is difficult to render into English the palpitating style of the original verses, but we quote some passages to illustrate the sentiment which inspired the painting of the gonfalone of S. Fiorenzo (the date of the banner is about 1476):

“Oh, most obstinate and wicked people—cruel, proud, and full of all iniquity, who hast placed thy faith and thy desires on things which are full of a mortal misery, I, the angel of Heaven, am sent unto you from God to tell you that he will put an end to all your wounds and weeping, your ruin and your curse, through the mediation of Mary.... Turn, turn your eyes, most miserable mortals, to the great examples of the past and present, to the utter miseries and heavy evils which Heaven sends to you because of all your sins: your homicide and your adultery, your avarice and luxury.... O, miserable beings, the justice of heaven works not in a hurry, but it punishes always, even as men deserve.... Nineveh was a city florid and magnificent, and Babylon was likewise, but now they are as nothing; and Sodom and Gomorrah, behold them now—a morass of sulphur and of fetid waters.... Oh, therefore be grateful, and acknowledge the benefits and graces of Our Saviour, and let your souls burn hotly with the fire of faith and charity, of hope and faithful love.... But, and if you should again grow slothful and unwilling to renounce your errors, I foretell a second judgment upon you, and I reckon that it will prove more terrible, more cruel than the first....”

The gonfalone on which this menacing appeal of the angel of God is painted is by Bonfigli, and was made at the time of a terrible pestilence which raged through Perugia at the end of the fifteenth century.

In Umbria therefore, more than in most countries, the history of her art should be studied side by side with the history of the times in which it was produced, for the one was, as it were, the spiritual escape or reaction from the other. The art of Umbria was perhaps only another form of that spirit which produced the teaching of S. Francis. The first pictures of Perugia are full of man’s best prayers, the earliest of them bear his stripes, in very few can we detect his wantonness or humour; and when we say that the later ones are imbued with man’s weakness, or at least his sentimentality, we make a most apparent platitude. It is sufficient in this place to note that whatever the final faults of the school, it originated in a purpose that was pure—the purpose of men who strove to represent the very opposite of all that fury, blood, and passion peculiar to the time and place in which they lived and painted.

To most people, therefore, who once have grasped these facts, there will be something sad, nay, even offensive, in the Pinacoteca at Perugia. Why, and for whom, were these purely religious paintings torn from their niches in the quiet churches, and hung up, side by side, in a glare of light on the walls of a gallery? How pale, and how sad they look, after all, the saints and the Marys, the angels and the holy Child, here on the bare grey walls. The thing has been said a hundred times before, but a friend at Perugia said it to us in a way we have never forgotten. He was a priest, and he loved his church. We were discussing together the present system of local picture galleries. His eyes grew dark. “Yes,” he said, “it is as though they would tear a child from the breasts of its mother. The mother withers and dies, and the child dies too, without her care in the wilderness where they laid it.”

It is the student of art who profits by the present arrangement, for the pictures at Perugia are not difficult to find. With the exception of the Duomo and S. Pietro, most of the churches have been ransacked, and their canvasses and panels neatly stored in perfect order of dates and names on the walls of the Pinacoteca, and it is an easy matter, even in a quiet morning’s stroll, to follow here the rise and fall of Umbrian art. In the limited space before us it will not be possible to give anything but a skeleton sketch of the school of Perugino. Larger works contain abundant store of facts about this particular centre of Italian art; but if one only shuts one’s eyes and dreams of it, the three great names start up before one: Pietro Vannucci, Raphael, and Pinturicchio. Close upon these follow other names; some, and these perhaps the fairest and most charming, rise like the dawn behind them: Ottaviano Nelli, Bonfigli, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. The pupils follow after Manni, Lo Spagna, Eusebio di S. Giorgio, l’Ingegno, Sinibaldo Ibi, Tiberio d’Assisi and a host of others, who die at last, feeble, but not utterly degraded, in the works of the two Alfanis.

An easy-going historian of Perugia summed up the earliest stages of her art in the following sentence: “I have not been able to discover that Perugia had any painters before the time of Bonfigli, but even if she had them, they will not have been worthy of mention.” The assertion was sweeping, and later writers have taken pains to contradict it, but for those who have only time for a superficial and general study of Perugian pictures it yet holds a good deal of truth. No great original work (with the exception of the missal workers, in which style of art Perugia is very rich) is left to us from the hand of a Perugian artist before the time of Bonfigli, and the early history of her art may be said to have been a great deal that of outside influences, for from very early times the best and greatest masters appear, like foreign tribes before them, to have climbed the hill and left some subtle marks upon her churches and her palaces.[94]

As the School of Siena died, that of Umbria awoke to life. Close upon the heels of Taddeo Bartoli, those men followed who were born to precede the School of Perugino. Before them there were around Perugia only phantoms: stiff saints on panels and on parchment, without dates, ghosts of unattained, though dimly felt, ideals—a scattered flock of “primitives,” left here and there on chapel walls or psalters. Then gradually, all through Umbria and her border lands, in a steady circle of glory, like the stars on a summer night, the lights arose and burned. At Gubbio, Camerino, Foligno, Gualdo, Fabriano, and Urbino we trace their steady progress through the work of men like Nelli, Piero della Francesca, Gentile da Fabriano, NiccolÒ Alunno, and many others. And as these stars arose great comets travelled through them—Giotto, Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Filippo Lippi, and others, till the whole sky was full. Then from the centre, straight from the hill of CittÀ della Pieve—there rose Pietro Perugino, and to his school came one with the halo of pure art upon his forehead,—Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

The following notes on the Pinacoteca and its pictures may be of use to anyone who requires a few more details than a guide-book can supply. They pretend to be nothing like a serious criticism, for the history of art is long and the books about it full; in most of them the art of Umbria is freely treated. We have gleaned our notes about the painters of Perugia from such sources as Vasari (who, however, is often prejudiced), Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and several local works. Any personal gossip has been drawn from the ever delightful works of Mariotti, whose words, if they be now and then a little antiquated, are as trustworthy as those of a faithful student’s only can be. We have dealt chiefly with the work of the Umbrian painters, and indeed, with the exception of Fra Angelico’s panels and those of some of the Sienese masters, there is little else to study in this small and charming gallery.

The Umbrian School followed close upon that of Siena, and the Gallery of Perugia has some fine bits of Sienese work, notably some panels by Taddeo Bartoli (1363-1422) in Sala IV. This room has some other good panels of early masters—of masters who probably influenced the Perugians, but whose names are lost to us.[95]

Room I.

Sala dei Cimelii.

The first room in the gallery is devoted to the very earliest art of Siena and Umbria, and is one of those rather painful collections of pictures which we find in every local Italian gallery—a room of the primitive painters—which are, as the narrow path of art, beset with many thorns, where only those who passionately love the goal need try to push the briars back and tread the damp and pebbles. But we never forget, though we may even dislike, the pitiful pale figures of the crucified Christ, and the staring wooden saints in triptychs, for in them is shown the strain of technical ignorance, but of ignorance which strives with passionate pain to get beyond itself and soar towards the expression of some deep emotion. This strain and impotent desire is amply shown in the monstrous figure of our Saviour by Magaritone d’Arezzo (see No. 26), which used to hang inside the chapel of S. Bernardino. Such as it is that figure had the seed of art in it, and of an art which, perhaps, had a greater power of appeal to the souls of men and women in pain than all the finished figures of the later painters. No. 28 is an interesting picture, inasmuch as the Bishop whom it represents holds tight to his breast a picture of the old town of Perugia. No. 16 is one of the earliest paintings known in Perugia. It is terribly damaged, and it is difficult to trace the story of the Saint in the battered little panels. These same panels were the first coffin of Beato Egidio (see p. 198). Sometime after his death a splendid tomb was made for the Saint, which can still be seen in the church of the University, and when the humbler coffin was pulled to pieces, some unknown local painter took the strange fancy to paint on it the history of the man whose bones it had first covered, together with an accurate portrait of his new and lovelier tomb. There are many other pictures in this room, among them (No. 11) an exquisite fragment of some old predella with two small angels on it; and one or two remains of early Sienese work.

Bonfigli.

The room which follows that devoted to the early schools, namely, the Cappella del Bonfigli, is to a student of history one of the most interesting points in the whole gallery, for here, through the frescoes of a most childlike and delightful painter, we live again the life of old Perugia; and here too we stand, face to face, with the authentic work of a man whose celebrity formerly centred round the fact that he was the first master of Perugino, but who, as the years go by, will, doubtless, ever more and more stand on his own feet, and shine because of some strange, subtle and ever-living charm, that of the individual, which clings to all his work.

The Pinacoteca has many of Bonfigli’s works, and no one who once has realised the fashion in which this early Umbrian master crowned his women and his angels will ever be able to forget it. How thin and exquisite the veils upon the pale, calm heads of his Madonnas; how fair and neat the wreaths of roses on the yellow hair of his young angels! Bonfigli was, indeed, a pleasant painter, and it is strange to think that his home relations were of a tempestuous order: “Certainly he had a wife,” says Mariotti, “and he had her of such a sort that she caused him nothing but anxiety; moreover, he was in constant strife with her.” But Bonfigli was not always calm in his painting. He could be humorous, he could have a touch of Carpaccio in him, as will be seen in his frescoes for the Magistrates’ Chapel; but he could also be passionate and dramatic. To understand him fully one must study him in his gonfaloni, or banners. Perugia has five of these—one of S. Bernardino, now in the Pinacoteca, another in the sacristy of S. Francesco al Prato; another in S. Fiorenzo (see p. 232); the fourth in S. Maria Nuova; and the fifth in S. Lorenzo.[96] All have suffered from exposure and from restoration, but they are unique and individual forms of art. The Christ in them is inexorable and revengeful, Death strives with man, saints and the Madonna try to interfere, and sad and supplicating groups of citizens kneel by their city walls and pray for grace.

Nothing is definitely known about the early life of Bonfigli. There seems to be no record of his birth. He was probably born about 1420, and died about 1496. The first authentic mention of his work is in 1454, when he undertook a commission from the priors and their chaplain to paint the walls of the Magistrates’ Chapel in the Palazzo Pubblico. That Bonfigli was well known and very highly appreciated in his native city before that date is evident. Mariotti tells us that he was called in by the citizens as one of the judges to pronounce judgment on Agostino Duccio’s faÇade at S. Bernardino. It is probable that he even had a school of painting—that school to which Vasari somewhat slightingly alludes in his life of Perugino.

Sala II.

Cappella di Bonfigli

(formerly the chapel of the Magistrates’ Guild).

Mariotti gives a long and humorous account of the contract between Bonfigli and the magistrates about the painting of their chapel. Undertaken in 1454 the work was still unfinished at the time of the painter’s death in 1496, and Mariotti is unable to discover any sufficient reason for such undignified delay. “I do not easily think ill of anyone,” he writes, “and least of all of painters, but certainly in those years we have no record even of any influenza raging in the city of Perugia.” When the chapel was half painted, Fra Filippo Lippi was called in to judge about its excellence. He found the pictures good, and voted a sum of four hundred florins in payment to Bonfigli, who once more, and with infinite slowness, went to work upon them. Only the skeleton of this work remains. At the end of the last century, Mariotti thus bewails it: “But the pictures of Bonfigli—oh, my God—how have they been ravaged by the little care bestowed upon them, how devastated by the course of time.” Half ruined by a form of restoration which perhaps is worse than none, ill-lighted, and without their former colour, the frescoes yet remain a delightful and engaging study. They represent the lives of the two bishops, St Louis of Toulouse, and S. Ercolano, patron saints of Perugia. To the right as you enter, and in a dark corner by the window is the Consecration of S. Louis; next to it the miracle of the fish performed by that Saint. This picture is admirably preserved. The landscape is one of those half real and half fantastic follies of a wise man which always charm one. Bonfigli knew that he must paint a town by the seashore; he painted the sea, but he put his own fair Umbrian city straight down upon its shores. There stands the church of S. Domenico with its celebrated windows, and up behind it, tier on tier, there rise the towers and the brown roofs of the city that we read about, the Perugia of the middle ages, against a dark blue sky. The miracle is a naÏve one. A merchant lost his bag of gold during a storm at sea. He prayed to S. Louis to reveal to him what had become of it. S. Louis appeared in heaven and showed that a certain large fish had swallowed the purse. The fish was caught, cut open, and inside it was the merchant’s bag of gold. We see the fisherman toiling up from his boat with the heavy fish upon his shoulders, and then we see the monks cutting open the fish, and the merchant and his wife receiving their money. So realistically is the scene presented, that we even see the blood of the fish upon the bag.

The next picture has been terribly damaged, and it is difficult to understand the subject; but a learned gentleman of Perugia, to whom we are indebted for various most ingenious suggestions, fancies that it is simply the representation of some miracle of healing performed by the Saint in Rome; certainly Bonfigli has striven to combine in his background a marvellous mixture of Roman and Etruscan architecture, the arch of Constantine mingling with Porta Susanna and the Colosseum!

The following fresco is perhaps the most delightful of the series. It represents the burial of the Bishop of Toulouse. Now S. Louis is known to have died in his father’s castle of Brignolles in Provence at the early age of twenty-four, but all this was of very secondary importance to the ingenuous Bonfigli. It was sufficient for him to know that a dead Bishop had to be painted. He selected the architecture that he loved best—his own Perugian church of S. Pietro—he sliced it in half so that all might look inside it, and on a bier in the centre of the aisle he laid the corpse of a quite middle-aged Bishop. With infinite care and faithful precision he copied the lines of his church. The true basilica is here, not touched at all by decoration. There was no choir in those days; a dark blue sky looks in at the windows, the roof is bare with all its rafters showing. But the central figure is out of all proportion. The feet and the head of S. Louis of Toulouse almost touch the columns in the aisle. His robe, with the golden fleur de lis, is neatly folded round him, his mitre glistens in the light; his face is grey and calm, and full of dignity and of repose. Bonfigli had a sense of humour and could not refrain from a touch of caricature. It is impossible to look at the group of monks and prelates round S. Louis, and not to feel at once convinced of this. A fat and pompous Bishop, in golden cope and mitre, is saying the mass for the dead. His large red book is supported by the head of a kneeling friar, and the very thumbs of this friar express his disgust and discomfort. To the left of the Bishop a group of roaring monks take up his words and repeat them in dolorous voices. Only to look at their faces one knows that their litany is absolutely out of tune. At the head of the Saint another priest is reading in a book, his acolytes swing incense, one holds the Bishop’s staff. The rest of the church is filled with quiet groups of men and women; and the most charming figure of the whole is that of a young man in a red gown with a shock of yellow curls, who kneels, lost in prayer, at the knees of the dead Saint, his back turned to us.

The next picture represents the siege of Perugia by Totila. No doubt this siege—that most memorable event in the annals of Perugia—was rather a chaos to the mind of Bonfigli as it is to many people nowadays; but the following history, taken from old chronicles, will explain the whole fantastic pageant. It will be remembered that Totila besieged Perugia in 549, and that the little town held out valiantly, but finally fell into the power of the Goths. During a terrible siege the Bishop of Perugia, S. Ercolano, attempted certain childlike and vain subterfuges of war, which unhappily ended in failure and in his own martyrdom. Ciatti, in his somewhat weariful and dreamy style, records the events of the siege as follows:—

FIRST TRANSLATION OF THE BODY OF S. ERCOLANO (FRESCO IN THE PINACOTECA OF PERUGIA)
FIRST TRANSLATION OF THE BODY OF S. ERCOLANO (FRESCO IN THE PINACOTECA OF PERUGIA)

“It is said that the saintly Bishop S. Ercolano, receiving much heavenly aid and holy counsels, and perhaps led by God, turned his soul to an act of human prudence. It happened that the city was reduced to extreme misery by reason of the scarcity of victuals, so that the citizens decided to surrender or to die fighting. S. Ercolano counselled them to bring him any grain which should still be found in the granaries, and they, knowing his great sanctity, obeyed and brought to him, after most diligent search, one small measure of corn. Then the Saint took the sole surviving lamb” (Bonfigli in his frescoes has painted an ox) “and, to the wonder and silent indignation of the people, he gave it to eat of the grain; it ate abundantly and the Bishop then threw the lamb with great force down from the ramparts, when, by reason of its great fulness and the height of its fall, the innocent beast was at once killed. When the captains of the enemy beheld this thing they were angry, saying: ‘These Perugians have so much grain that they can give it to their beasts to eat, and so much meat that they cast it carelessly away, how can we, therefore, hope to subdue them by famine?’ But it chanced that a young acolyte spoke from off the ramparts to some Goths and unwittingly revealed to them the distress and the mortality reigning in the city by reason of the want of food; and the stratagem of S. Ercolano becoming known in the camp, the infuriated Goths, hot with anger, returned to the attack and with impetuous fury assailed the deserted walls. Greeks and Perugians rushed to arms, but what could they, poor starvelings, do against the Gothic host?”

Thus fell Perugia. Our learned author goes on to describe how S. Ercolano was conducted to the ramparts and after his skin had been torn off in strips from the neck downwards, he was beheaded and his body thrown into the ditch. Some faithful adherents gave it secret burial, and finding the body of the foolish young acolyte near by, laid it in the same grave. Later, Uliphus, governor of the city, allowed the Perugians to give their beloved pastor proper burial. To the astonishment of all beholders the Saint’s head was found joined to his body, which seemed like that of a man asleep. This miracle converted many of the Arian Goths to the Roman faith, and “with rejoicings and hymns of praise the body of S. Ercolano was borne through the streets to the church of S. Lorenzo.”

The next picture gives the burial of S. Ercolano. It is only a fragment, and we can hardly piece the scattered groups together. There is a lovely little group of ladies to the left—a set of typical Bonfigli women with exquisite white headgear. The curving front of the Palazzo Pubblico upon the Corso is painted with accurate care, the loggia of Fortebraccio too, is clearly seen and understood. But the picture is only a shadow; the part we most wish to see, namely, the north front of the Palazzo, is wholly obliterated, and the restoration spoils it terribly.

In the next fresco the body of S. Ercolano is being carried from S. Pietro to S. Lorenzo, and Bonfigli has seized this excellent opportunity to paint a fresh portrait of his native city. In the foreground the basilica of S. Pietro with a colonnaded front and unfinished campanile is faithfully depicted, and behind the funeral procession (which by the way is moving in quite the wrong direction) the town towers up into the sky like a pack of yellow cards, broken only by its towers and campaniles.[97]

Rooms VI. and VII.

Sala di Bonfigli and Sala di Bernardino di Mariotto.

Before leaving the subject of Bonfigli it will be well to look at some other pieces of his work which are painted in quite a different manner. Amongst these is a Madonna and Child (No. 13). It is a beautiful specimen of the master’s purely pietistic painting.[98] Tradition says that Fra Filippo Lippi ordered this picture. It has suffered terribly, for in old days it was hung in the lavatory of S. Domenico, and as the friars washed their hands they must have splashed the water up against the panels. No. 10, the Adoration of the Magi, is also by Bonfigli. The picture as a whole is perhaps more interesting than beautiful, inasmuch as it is one of the very few religious pictures of the Umbrian School where the portraits of living people have been introduced. Orsini tells us that the Madonna is a portrait of Bonfigli’s sister, the Child a picture of his nephew, and the youngest of the three kings that of his brother. The loveliest point in the picture is the group of angels up in the roof. Bonfigli must, we think, have seen the swallows flitting at springtime in and out of some low breezy barn, and put their movements into angels’ forms. The predella, too, is a perfect gem in itself, notably the panel of the Baptism where the wilderness is painted dark and brown, but the sunrise is full upon the figures of three angels who stand with crowns of roses on their heads and watch the scene among the rocks. There is an Annunciation in the same room by Bonfigli; and it again is chiefly charming because of the treatment of the angels. They come fluttering up behind a group of cypress trees, all in the flush of dawn. But the foreground figure is strange indeed. What did Bonfigli mean when he painted S. Luke and his ox, and planted them there in the midst of the picture so as quite to distract one’s attention from the principal figures of the piece? In the next room (Sala VII.) Bonfigli’s angels can be studied with ease. There are in all eight panels of them, and it is interesting to see how the early painter strove between realism and idealism in the faces. He loved his smiling angels best; what care he took to crown them with pink roses; what baskets too of roses he gave to them to carry! yet to his angels of the Passion he gave no roses, only the symbols of the Crucifixion, its anguish and its thorns.

We have lingered long over the work of a man whose figure is such an attractive one in the Umbrian school. Before passing on to the work of his contemporaries we must mention the name of another artist four of whose pictures are hung in the room of the Bonfigli angels: namely, Bernardino di Mariotto. Bernardino is an interesting figure in the gallery, and one is struck at first sight by the quality of his work, which differs from everything round it. He seems like some strange missing link in the history of the Umbrian and the Roman school; and so little is known about him that up to a quite recent date his work was confused with that, first of much earlier painters, and then of Pinturicchio. His treatment of detail: the Virgin’s gown, the garlands of fruit and flowers, the angels’ wings and the saints’ dresses, is beautiful though his colour is cold and hard. His peculiar use of a very stiff baldachin made people say that he was a master of Raphael. As a matter of fact he lived at S. Severino in the Marches and worked about the years 1502 to 1521.

In the same room there are two big pictures by Bartolomeo Caporali, who was a pupil of Perugino. His great flying angels in No. 12 are like the angels of Bonfigli gone mad, there is something grand in the rush of their wings, and whatever the faults of the somewhat exaggerated composition, it forces one’s immediate attention.

GONFALONE OF THE ANNUNCIATION BY NICCOLÒ ALUNNO
GONFALONE OF THE ANNUNCIATION BY NICCOLÒ ALUNNO

To return to the order of the earlier painters, we come to one or two names which are probably more familiar to most people than that of Bonfigli: these are Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Boccati da Camerino and NiccolÒ Alunno. There is a fine bit of Alunno’s work in Sala VII. (No 14). It is about the only thing of his which is now attributed to him in Perugia. Such a host of angels singing and playing to God in the heavens, and a charming garden scene round the young Virgin! She kneels very quietly at her desk. Neat pots of flowers stand on the marble wall behind her and three stiff cypress trees against the sky; round a corner of the garden wall two very engaging angels stand gossiping together, their heads thrown back, their mouths a little pouting. In the immediate foreground two patron saints are kneeling to introduce a group of lawyers who commissioned the painting of the banner.

Boccati da Camerino’s work is rare. There is a charming thing of his in Sala VI. (No. 13): a Madonna and a fascinating choir of angels. His largest picture (No. 16) is in the same room and represents the same subject. The Madonna sits enthroned under a heavy pergola of roses, and all around her is a stiff little choir of angels: a most delightful and original conception. The picture was painted for the monks of S. Domenico, and so the emblem of the saint, his dog, had to figure in it. What Boccati was about we cannot judge, but he certainly painted an ermine instead of a dog, and the little Christ receives the strange beast with delight. The predella of the picture is full of stories almost in the style of Carpaccio. Boccati had a rare and charming fancy. In his scene of the procession to Calvary, he shows how a rude soldier attempts to strike the fainting figure of Christ; and one of the horses of the guard, with ears bent back, stoops forward to bite the hand of him who would distress the Saviour.

Rooms VIII. and IX.

Sala di Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Gabinetto di Fiorenzo di Lorenzo.

We now come to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, to whose name two rooms in the Pinacoteca have been dedicated. Very little is known about his life. We can only gather that he studied in the school of Bonfigli, and that he competed with Bonfigli in the painting of banners. He may have been a rather younger man, but he was earlier than Perugino and his scholars, and so he forms a sort of link between the masters and the pupils of a great school.

Fiorenzo may be said to have begun the school which now is called the school of Perugino. It was he who distinctly and for ever broke away from that Greek or Byzantine influence which we feel in much of Bonfigli’s work. In his own day he was eclipsed by the greater lights which rose up round him, and it is only to us, who try to trace the school, that he is such a really important and delightful figure. Throughout his work one feels a great effort towards light—towards fresh issues. His drawing and his colour are often very beautiful, but there is a great difference in the style of the various works ascribed to him. Compare No. 53 (Sala VIII.) and its surrounding panels, with Nos. 30, 6, and 5. (The three latter probably all formed part of one large altar-piece.)

The Adoration, attributed to Fiorenzo, is a crowded but a beautiful composition. The Virgin, S. Joseph, and a group of shepherds kneel in the foreground, and exquisite flowers, grape-hyacinths,

ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS BY FIORENZO DI LORENZO
ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS BY FIORENZO DI LORENZO

even some fluffy heads of dandelion seed grow at their feet. Behind them is the stable—an Umbrian stable in an Umbrian landscape—filled with a host of angels. In the dim distance the shepherds feed their flocks upon the hills. The figures are mere sketches of some Umbrian goat-herds whom Fiorenzo must have met outside the Umbrian farms at dawn. Nos. 10 and 16 (in Sala IX.) are beautiful specimens of the master’s later work. Note the hand and the crimson sleeves of the Virgin.

But if Fiorenzo could apply himself with the religious ardour of his school to sacred subjects, to the Bible of his art, he could also sometimes take a holiday and write a fantastic and entrancing scherzo on his own account. It is his series of pictures on the life of San Bernardino of Siena which at once attracts us in the gallery. Here we find one of those wonderful visions of the past—a record of men’s manners, of their costumes and architecture, as seen through the eyes of some intelligent yet child-like artist.[99] To describe the miracles is not an easy matter. In seeking the subject one is carried away by the charm of the models, just as the painter was who painted them. A company of entrancing youths with long thin legs, their marvellous crimson tunics trimmed with fur, their small caps barely clinging to their shocks of golden curls, strut up and down the panels, but barely conscious of the Saint and all his patient care of them. No 3, represents the miracle of a girl who has fallen into a well, and whom the Saint has saved from drowning; we see a lovely and impassive creature sitting upon the marble floor, her yellow hair has not been wetted, the small red fillet binds it gracefully; her relations and her lovers pray and pose all round her, but little ruffled by the memory of the late catastrophe. Just the same is the accident of the mason, treated in No. 7. His comrades stand about the wounded man, exquisite and undisturbed. “Ah,” they seem to say, “thus and thus it happened, thus, maybe, he fell”; but all the time they are thinking of their well-set tunics and of their long and lovely legs; and who can be surprised at this, seeing that their toilette is carried to perfection? No. 5 shows the capture and escape of a prisoner. It has a pleasant landscape in the background, a sort of park, with a lake and trees about it. In No. 6 the Saint appears in a cloud under a beautiful marble palace and heals the blindness of a fellow friar. The doctors do seem somewhat interested, but everything is too beautiful and finished for much pity or, anyhow, for pain; and as for the hair of the young men in this panel, it is more excellently curled than in any of the series. The remaining miracles are by another hand. Some pupil or imitator of Fiorenzo tried to finish them, but the treatment is coarser, the charm of the first is gone.

Room V.

Sala dell’ Angelico.

Before passing on to the work of Perugino and his school, which one must confess, with the exception of Sala XI., is but a disappointing show of canvasses and panels, one passes through the little room of Fra Angelico.

In Taine’s slight but exquisite sketch of Perugia and its pictures we read the following words about the work of Fra Angelico at Perugia: “He was happier here than in his pagan Florence, and it is he who first attracts us (in the gallery). Looking at his work there, one seems to be reading in the ‘Imitatio Christi,’ for on the golden background the pure sweet faces breathe a quiet stillness, like the immaculate roses in the gardens of Paradise.” Taine is right; everyone is at once attracted to the work of the Florentine monk when they come to the gallery of Perugia. We have searched for some record of the friar’s visit to Perugia, but have not been successful. It is certain that the Florentine painter came to stay in Umbria, leaving behind him as a legacy to later painters the influence of his pious gentle art. He became a monk in 1408 at Fiesole, but his convent got mixed up in painful religious disputes, and the monks had to fly and wander into other lands, hoping to return when times should be more peaceful. Fra Angelico came to Cortona, and there did some of his very earliest work. Thence, very probably, he travelled to Foligno, staying on his way to rest at Perugia, and leaving there, in the church of S. Domenico, that wonderful picture, all the parts of which now hang together in the Pinacoteca. They are jewels, these small panels—jewels fresh as dewdrops on the first May wreaths of girls. Angelico never lost this bloom of utter purity, and here we find it at its very dawn. The Madonna and Child are in the centre; round them stand four angels, their baskets full of roses. “Two angels in long dresses,” says Taine, “bring their roses to the feet of the small Christ with the dreaming eyes. They are so young, and yet so earnest.” Again, of the Annunciation, he says: “The Virgin is candour and sweetness itself; her character is almost German, and her two hands are clasped with deep religious fervour. The angel with the curly hair who kneels before her seems almost like some young and happy girl—a little raw perhaps—and coming straight from the house of her mother.... These indeed, are the delicate touches that painters of a later date will never find again. A sentiment is an infinite and incommunicable thing; no learning and no effort will ever reproduce it absolutely. In real piety there is a certain reserve; a certain modesty is shown in the arrangement of the draperies and in the choice of little details, such as even the best masters, only a century later, will not understand at all.” It is difficult to choose any particular point for description in the twelve narrow panels of saints. Angelico carefully studied to show the individual character of each. He gave to his Magdalen a new and lovely attitude—a sort of ascetic repose. Of her physical beauty he only left the yellow hair; it falls to her ankles gold as the maize in autumn, but her body is wasted beneath it. St Catherine of Siena is said to be a really authentic portrait of the Saint. The Bishop of Toulouse is unlike that of Bonfigli, younger and gentler in expression. The whole set make an ineffably sweet impression on our mind, and it is difficult to turn to the other pictures in the room. Of these the best and the most interesting is by Piero della Francesca.

Piero was one of Perugino’s first masters. He was born early in the fifteenth century at Borgo San Sepolcro. He had a passion for perspective, and was one of the first men who made a real study of this branch of art. We hear that he wrote books on geometry, and grappled with Euclid and the laws of measurement. He also studied the proportion of light and shade, and all these points are admirably proved by his picture at Perugia (No. 21). Vasari gives a full account of it in his life of Piero. He describes the lower part, then adds: “Above them is a most beautiful Annunciation with an angel, which seems, in truth, to have descended from heaven; and what is more, a range of columns in perspective, which is indeed most beautiful.” St Elizabeth of Hungary is a fine point in the lower composition. She wears a green gown, and in its skirt she carries the loaves which, by grace of heaven, and to defend her from the anger of her husband, were turned, as we know, to roses.

Room X.

Sala del Perugino.

An irresistible sense of sadness creeps over us as we pass through the room which bears the name of Pietro Perugino. Looking at the collection one feels much in the same frame of mind as one does in searching the wearisome domestic letters of a genius. Only one or two of the pictures attributed to Vannucci in the Pinacoteca of Perugia have the touch of the spirit in them. No. 25, which is double-sided like most of the altar-pieces of convents, where the one side faced the congregation and the other the monks or nuns, is a beautiful bit of Perugino’s work, fine both in colour and in sentiment. No. 10, too, is a small gem from one of Pietro’s really beautiful altar-pieces.[100] Nos. 20 and 4 are fragments of one enormous altar-piece (see p. 190), which used to hang in the church of S. Agostino and which like many others of Pietro’s finest works was torn to pieces, and carried across the Alps to swell the galleries of Napoleon. One hurries shuddering past pictures like Nos. 1, 5, and 26. It seems so impossible that what the Germans call a “SchÖne Seele” should have allowed such things to be.

Room XI.

Sala di Bernardino di Betto detto il Pinturicchio.

In the little room which leads out of Room X. we make an interesting study of Perugino’s pictures, for it contains some of his earliest and also some of his most decadent work. Had the municipality of Perugia just a touch of humour or malice when they hung No. 25 side by side with No. 16? Whatever they had in their heads they have given to us a curious study. Here are two works by the same man, the latter probably a pot-boiler of his school but still burdened with his name. Both represent precisely the same subject, the same set of saints is in each of them; but the early work is full of thought, of reverence and feeling; the early Sebastian, calm and grave, has the arrow in his very flesh, and the later Sebastian, simpering and affected, toys with his arrow and turns with painful affectation to the Saviour. There is a lovely little set of sketches on the predella under No. 6; the Nativity, a mere hurried impression, seems full of the breeze of early spring in Umbria.

We have a splendid bit of Pinturicchio’s work in this room which bears his name, and also one of the rare paintings of Lo Spagna; one or two pictures which bear at least the name of Raphael, and the much disputed “Adoration” which has been ascribed to more than one distinguished person.

Bernardino di Betto, usually known as Pinturicchio and sometimes as il Sordicchio because he was deaf, and small and of a mean appearance, studied in the school of Perugia, and indeed was one of its most distinguished painters; but having left that earliest studio he carried his talents to other parts, and painted as we know for popes and princes, painted above all things those two wonderful series of frescoes in the Duomo at Siena and in the Borgia rooms at the Vatican. He has been called sometimes the Umbrian Gozzoli; certainly he was the historical painter of the great school which grew in the times of Perugino. Vasari with a certain prejudice and ill nature insists that Pinturicchio’s success was one rather of opportunity than of talent; but it is much more probable that the painter was beloved because he was faithful to his promises and carried out his orders with care and with precision. We know, too, that after all the sums he got, and all his heavy labours, he died of hunger and neglect on a winter’s night at Siena, his wife having deserted him and eloped with a new lover.

Pinturicchio had a grant of land given to him in the neighbourhood of Perugia in 1495, by Alexander VI., and he determined to return to his native city and live there; but some years later, when in money difficulties, he was forced to sell it to a gentleman of Perugia.

The splendid altar-piece (No. 10), which alone remains to Perugia of this distinguished pupil of Perugino, is ill lighted and rather difficult to judge from top to bottom, but is interesting as well as beautiful; for the picture remains just as the painter painted it with all its panels in their proper order, unlike the panels of so many of Perugino’s finest altar-pieces. The PietÀ, the angel of the Annunciation, both the figures of the Virgin and the detail of their dresses, fruit and books, are exquisitely finished.

There is in the same room an excellent specimen of the work of another of Perugino’s scholars—Lo Spagna (No. 7). Giovanni di Pietro was one of the most distinguished of Vannucci’s school, and Kugler indeed pronounces him to be the most distinguished after Raphael. It is probable that he studied with Fiorenzo di Lorenzo before going to Vannucci’s studio, but it is difficult to discover any details about his private life. His whole career is shrouded in some mystery. His name would make one think he was Spanish by birth. We know that he left Perugia and went to live at Spoleto. Vasari declares that this was because the painters of Perugia were jealous of him and made life in their midst impossible; this fact is however severely denied by our gossip Mariotti, who declares that Lo Spagna was excessively well off in Spoleto, where he not only received the rights of citizenship but also secured a charming wife. Be all this as it may, of this really good artist, who combined in his work the influence of Raphael and of Perugino, only one piece is left in the place where he learned his art. The Madonna and Saints (No. 7) is a fine specimen of his work. The mother and the child are fresh and beautiful in colour and expression, and all the details of the dresses and the landscape infinitely careful. Note St Jerome, his gloves, his book, his hat and splendid gown. One other picture is ascribed to Giovanni in the same room, but it is greatly inferior in treatment.

We now come to the Adoration of the Magi, which after much dispute was some time ago ascribed to Perugino’s scholar Eusebio di San Giorgio, but which is still the subject of endless local discussions, as, owing to further and more minute investigations it is at length declared by excellent judges to be the work of Raphael. One reason given for this is that the young man to the right of the Virgin has on his trousers a strange design, the arms of Raphael. Poor Eusebio must turn in his grave. His former biographers, anxious to seize on any gem of painting which should save the artist from a rather mediocre position in the history of art, always stayed to shout exultant praises when they came to this picture, and now the critic would tear even this glory from his brows and crown another man whose head is already heavy with their laurels.[101]

No. 20—a Madonna and Child—is ascribed to Raphael. The picture certainly has something of the master in it and it may be the work of the mere boy, when first he came from Urbino to paint with Perugino, and in the Umbrian city dreamed his great Madonna of the future. Raphael Sanzio passes like a dream through Perugia, leaving no certain relic of his mighty fame save one faint faded fresco on the church wall of S. Severo, and these poor relics in the gallery.[102]

Room XII.

Sala di Giannicola e di Berto di Giovanni.

From this point forwards the interest of the gallery begins to wane. We have tracked the dawn and seen the sunrise; now we feel the dull warmth of midday, and passing through the weary hours of the afternoon, most fully and amply represented in the work of the two Alfanis, we pass to night through the fevered rooms of the Decadence. Sala XII. is devoted to the work of Perugino’s scholars, but most of it is weak. Still there is a touch of the old sweetness here and there among the figures. Note No. 15 by Giannicola Manni. It has a charm though it is very imitative. The rest of Giannicola’s work in this room is rather dreary. But there is charm, too, in the purely imitative, nay copied work of Berto di Giovanni. Berto was another of Perugino’s scholars. He lived probably towards the end of the fifteenth century and it is evident that he felt a passionate admiration for his fellow student, Raphael. All we can gather of facts about Berto comes to us through his connection with Raphael. In 1516 he contracted to paint, in combination with his hero, a picture for the nuns of Monteluce. Bits of the predella are now in the Pinacoteca. In the flat and almost womanish sketches of Berto one traces his persistent admiration for the greater artist. It is as though an intelligent child had torn the leaves from its mother’s sketch-book and filled in the lines with faithful and laborious colouring. (See Nos. 19 to 26.) But Berto’s charm, such as it is, went all wrong when he tried to paint big subjects. Nos. 16 and 14 are little more than failures.

* * * * * * * *

To anyone who admires the work of the two Alfani, Domenico and Orazio, a happy hunting-ground exists in the last big rooms of the Pinacoteca. How it came about that one of Perugino’s really lovely frescoes got hung in this part, we cannot tell, but it is certain that the Nativity (No. 31, Room XIII.) is one of the loveliest things that remain of Pietro in the town of Perugia. It is very like our own Nativity in the National Gallery, faint and fair in colour, calm and true in composition, with a peculiar lilac colour of crushed grapes throughout the dresses and the landscape.

It would be impossible to close any account of the school of Perugino without a slight sketch of the two Alfanis whose intense admiration for the genius of painting became a fault, and who, through their very earnestness preserved the corpse from which the life long since had fled. The Alfanis, Domenico the father, and Orazio the son, had money and long life. These two happy gifts they employed in the paths of art; with these two gifts they at length degraded what they really attempted to exalt. Domenico was such a passionate admirer of Raphael that one of his historians declared him to have died in the same year as Sanzio. Mariotti denies this. “However passionate a friend and inseparable a companion,” he urges, “Domenico had not for certain such a crazy folly as to accompany him to the other world.” Domenico far outlived Raphael. In his long life he absorbed the teaching of many schools, and utterly obliterated his own personality in the work of other people. His son Orazio did the same. They went into partnership, started a large school or studio, and there created the innumerable, rather middle-class pictures, which cover the walls of the Pinacoteca. Grazio survived his father about thirty years, and was the first president of the Academy of Perugia founded in 1573.

* * * * * * * *

One word to close these notes about the painters of the Umbrian school.

Seek out the painters in the places where they painted. Go to Spoleto for the works of Lo Spagna, to Gubbio for the masterpiece of Nelli, to Spello for Pinturicchio, to Foligno for the early men who have not even names. Go in May to Montefalco, when all the green of Umbrian angels’ wings is in the lanes which lead to these. Learn by heart the Umbrian landscape if you wish to really love and understand the spirit of Umbrian art. The Pinacoteca of Perugia serves only as a backbone for the genuine study.[103]