Perugino Part 1

Perugino.

by Selwyn Brinton.

I

In considering the work of one of the greatest of the masters of the Renaissance, we have to go further back than the disputed question as to who was the first teacher of Pietro di Cristofano Vannucci--surnamed by his contemporaries "_il Perugino_," the Perugian--and to inquire into the more interesting story of his predecessors in that wonderful School of Umbria, on which his art puts, in a certain sense, the seal and completion.

In an earlier work on this subject I traced this school, in its first definite inception, to that grand old religious painter Niccolo da Foligno, whose art may be studied within his native city of Foligno--in his great altar-piece of the church of S. Niccolo--in Perugia, Paris, London, and his fine paintings in the Vatican Gallery at Rome; and in all these works I traced in Niccolo a great master, "archaic but strong in drawing and full of character, possessing just the qualities of the founder of a great school." But upon that school many influences were to stream in, and to affect its progress. The earlier art of Siena, the city of Mary Virgin, intensely emotional and religious in its character, the dignity of Duccio and the Lorenzetti, the grace and delicate beauty of Simone Memmi were among these. Close to Niccolo himself, in the hill-town of Montefalco, the Florentine, Benozzo Gozzoli, pupil of Fra Angelico, had been busied on picture stories from St. Francis' legend, which seem to find their continuation in the Perugian miracle pictures of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo; and yet nearer to Florence, in the Umbrian Borderland, that "King of Painting," Piero della Francesca, was to combine the Umbrian emotion with Florentine intellectualism.

These are the influences which were to stream upon the young Pietro as an eager and industrious student--some among them of course indirectly, but others no doubt very directly and immediately.

Vasari's account, which is still of first value save where it is opposed by stronger evidence, is that he was sent as a poor boy to grind colours and run errands in the "bottega" of some Perugian painter. The impression which is here given of his extreme poverty is probably exaggerated. The Vannucci family had enjoyed the citizenship of Perugia since 1427, nor was it in Perugia but in their native township of Castel (later Citta) della Pieve that his son Pietro was born to Cristofano Vannucci.

But we may take it that he left the paternal roof while yet a child (he was probably not more than nine years old), and was apprenticed, as above stated, in Perugia--though to what artist Vasari does not tell us. Here, therefore, conjecture is rife, and Buonfigli,--that delightful decorator of the Perugian Palazzo Pubblico,--Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and even Niccolo da Foligno himself have been a.s.signed by various critics as his teacher. Personally, I incline to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, whose easel paintings in the Gallery of Perugia seem to foreshadow the typical Perugino background; but it is yet more probable that either as a master or (as suggested by Crowe and Cavalcaselle) as a journeyman a.s.sociate he may have come under the influence of Piero della Francesca, and gained from him that intimate knowledge of perspective which appears in all his later works.

In any case this unknown master--if we are to believe Vasari--was an inspiring influence; for not only "did he never cease to set before Pietro the great advantages and honours that were to be obtained from painting ... but when the boy was wont to frequently inquire of him in what city the best artists were formed ... he constantly received the same reply, namely, that Florence was the place above all others wherein men attain to perfection in all the arts, but more especially in painting." I spare to my reader the long harangue which Vasari here puts into the mouth of young Pietro's unknown teacher, and which the critic pretty certainly evolved out of his own inner consciousness; and come to his conclusion, which is, that our Pietro, with every goodwill to improve himself, came to Florence, and entered the famous bottega of Andrea del Verrocchio. Nor do I see any sufficient ground to reject this statement, though Morelli in his "Italian Painters" (vol. i. p. 107) emphasises very properly the importance of his earlier training, "in all probability at Perugia, under Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and then at Arezzo under Piero della Francesca," and will not have him described "as unconditionally the pupil of Verrocchio." The point to notice here is that Pietro must have been a fairly advanced artist when he went, obviously to "finish" himself, to Florence, and that in his earlier work it is not so much the direct influence of Verrocchio which counts as that of his countrymen, the Umbrians.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--ST. SEBASTIAN

(In the Musee 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, _Sagitte tue infixe 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 a.s.sociate:

"_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 'a.s.sumption 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 "a.s.sumption." 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 circ.u.mcision, 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sistance--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 s.p.a.ciousness, which Mr. Berenson has very happily defined by the phrase of "s.p.a.ce-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 s.p.a.ces 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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.

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. MCCCCLx.x.xXV._--and there are studies for it in the Uffizi collection of drawings and at Christ Church, Oxford.]

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.

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 facade 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--

PETRUS DE PERUSIA PINXIT 1491.

The Albani altar-piece had always ranked as one of Perugino's loveliest and most typical creations, worthy to stand beside the beautiful altar-piece of the Certosa of Pavia, of which England is now the fortunate possessor in her National Gallery; but to this busy and fertile period in the master's career belong a number of attractive and interesting works, which we must now endeavour in some measure to cla.s.sify and a.n.a.lyse.

I have already alluded to the altar-piece of S. Domenico at Fiesole; but Pietro painted another altar-piece for the same church in 1493, which is now in the Uffizi Gallery, a "Virgin Enthroned," between Saints Sebastian and John Baptist, dated and signed, as usual, "Petrus Perusinus." The "Crucifixion" of La Calza (Florence), showing very markedly the influence of Luca Signorelli, may have probably preceded this; but to the same year of 1493 belongs the beautiful "Pieta" (Dead Christ) of the Florence Accademia, and the wonderful and most impressive "Crucifixion" of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (Florence) was commissioned by Pietro Pucci in 1493, though it was not completed till April of 1496. Unsurpa.s.sed here is the master in the solemnity, the sense of aloofness from earthly things, which he conveys to us in these six figures--the Crucified, with as spectators His mother, the beloved disciple, and kneeling saints, seen against the wide stretch of such an Umbrian background as we may see from Perugia or Cortona or a.s.sisi; and next in importance to this masterpiece of religious art is the famous "Pieta" of S. Chiara, of which Vasari speaks with such enthusiasm.

"He worked out for the ladies of Santa Chiara a painting of the dead Christ, with colouring so lovely and so fresh that by good craftsmen it was held a thing marvellous and excellent. In this work certain very lovely heads of old men are to be seen, and likewise certain Maries who, with weeping faces, regard the dead man with reverence and wondrous love; and moreover he made a landscape which was then highly esteemed. It is said that Francesco del Pugliese would fain have given to the aforesaid nuns three times as much money as they had paid to Pietro, and in addition offered to give them a similar painting made by the artist's own hand; and they would not agree, because Pietro said that he could never equal that original." This n.o.ble creation of religious art is now in the Pitti Palace at Florence, and fully bears out Vasari's appreciative criticism: in composition, in beauty of type in the mourning women and men, in the lax body of the dead Saviour, in the exquisite landscape with its trees defined against the far sky, our master touches here a very high level in religious art. As usual with works of this importance he fully signed it, on the rock on which the Christ is laid--

PETRUS PERUSINUS PINXIT A.D.

MCCCCLx.x.xXV;

and the very careful studies which he made for the groups in this picture may be seen among the drawings of the Uffizi collection.

When we consider that the magnificently virile portrait of Francesco delle Opere (1494), now in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, belongs to this same period, as well as the lovely "Madonna with Saints" of S.

Agostino at Cremona (1494, signed and dated), the "Ascension of Christ," painted for S. Pietro at Perugia (1495, now at Lyons Hotel de Ville), and the grand altar-piece of the Vatican (1496), which I shall describe more fully later, we shall agree with the critics (Crowe and Cavalcaselle), who describe the year 1495 as "remarkable in the career of Vannucci. It was that in which an Umbrian ... successfully applied the laws of composition and added a calm tenderness to the gravity of the Florentine school; and through his influence on Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael replaced, as far as it was possible, the pious mysticism that had perished with Angelico." The master's influence on Fra Bartolommeo may be clearly traced in the "Pieta" of S. Chiara, the forerunner of the Frate's own n.o.ble work; and it was not far from this very time (1495) that the young Rafaelle Sanzio must have entered his Perugian workshop.

II

We have now traced the art of Pietro Vannucci from its first beginnings in the workshop of some unknown teacher at Perugia to the time when he was one of the accepted masters of Italian art, as much at home in Florence--that glowing centre of artistic impulse and creation--as in his own Perugia, or in the Rome of the Renaissance Popes. Here, then, before we proceed further with the story of his art, which is practically the story of his busy life, there are some points on which we shall not waste time in lingering. We saw how Perugino, like Giotto himself and almost every great master of Italian painting, had perfected his knowledge and trained his eye and hand in the practice of fresco-painting; and we have next to notice that he obtained fame among his contemporaries, as well as patronage, from his knowledge and use of the new oil medium. Vasari on this point is most explicit: "Certainly colouring was a matter which Pietro thoroughly understood, and this both in fresco as well as in oil ..." and again he mentions certain pictures specially as being painted in oil.

Of course one cannot set up even such direct evidence from Vasari as conclusive, for we know there are many slips in his invaluable chronicle; and this very point of the master's medium for his panel pictures has been questioned by modern critics.

Dr. G. C. Williamson in his excellent monograph on Perugino refers to Mr. Herbert Horne--a critic whose opinion on Italian art carries great weight--as saying that "all Perugino's pictures were painted in tempera on a ges...o...b..ckground," and suggests at least that an entirely different technique can be traced in the Albani altar-piece and that of the Certosa. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, in their notice of Perugino, have a.n.a.lysed very carefully his technique, and shown how his flesh tints were worked up from a warm brown undertone, through a succession of glazes, each lighter in colour and fuller in body than the last, "receiving light from without and transparency from within," till the highest light was reached.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--ST. MARY MAGDALEN

(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)

A very lovely figure idealised in type, and recalling, though younger, the Virgin of the great Crucifixion in S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi at Florence. Across the bosom, embroidered, runs the legend "S. Maria Maddalena."]

In this a.n.a.lysis the authors have obviously and entirely the oil medium in view; but there is another view which, as it seems to me, may throw light upon the question.

Experiments have, as I understand, been made in late years in Germany to combine the use of tempera with that of oil-painting--the object being to combine the brilliancy and richness of oil with the lasting colour of tempera, in which yolk of egg was used with the pure colours--and I believe that certain results have been attained. Now this was just the position of painting in Perugino's day, when upon the old tempera panels of the Giottesques and their successors the oil technique of the Van Eycks was a.s.serting its advantages; and I would suggest that our master in this period of transition used both mediums, and perhaps sometimes in the same picture may have pa.s.sed from one to the other. Here, too, his connection with the Gesuati may have aided him materially, for Vasari tells us expressly how these friars, for whom he worked very frequently, were practised in the art of colours as well as enamel and gla.s.s-painting, and it was perhaps from them that he had learned the secret which makes his altar-pieces still so transparent and so pure in colour.