CHAPTER IX

_Pietro Perugino and the Cambio_[85]

The name of Perugia is naturally connected with that of Pietro Vannucci _detto il Perugino_, or, as he preferred to sign himself, _Petrus de Castro Plebis_, who stamped the peculiar personality of his painting upon a whole school of Renaissance Italian art. Vannucci was by no means the first artist of the Umbrian school, but he was the man who brought it into general notice, and it was in the city of Perugia that he lived and worked, and had his school of painting.

The best of Perugino's work, however, with the exception of his frescoes in the Cambio, is not to be found in his native town. The indefatigable Napoleon had a profound admiration for Pietro's altar-pieces. He sought them out, he insisted on getting every inch of them, down to their smallest predellas, and the splendid pictures of S. Pietro, S. Lorenzo, and S. Agostino went over the Alps to swell his galleries in the Tuileries. The frescoes of the Cambio could not go, and they at least remain exactly as the master painted them. To understand the man Pietro as well as the artist, we must study in the Cambio, for there his portrait hangs face to face with a whole set of his frescoes, and the contrast of the painter's face and the faces he invariably gave to his saints is almost as strange as that between the Umbrian saints and the history of the times in which they lived and worked.

To understand the painters of Perugia one must understand the period in which they were produced. One wonders whether Vasari reckoned at all with this when he wrote his life of Perugino. The Florentine was not particularly just to Umbrian painters in general, and of Pietro Vannucci he paints a very unsympathetic portrait. He accuses him of two great faults: avarice and irreligion, and these have become so inevitably connected with Pietro's name that it is not easy to dispute them. Yet, if not absolutely false, the facts have been grossly exaggerated. Concerning the first--avarice--Vasari maintains that Pietro painted exclusively for the sake of gain, and never for that of art or faith. This accusation has been disproved by later writers in so far as the early life of Perugino is concerned. We hear, for instance, that he painted several banners for his native city in the time of plague and war, that he asked no money for them, and when the time of need was past he took them back and kept them in his studio. Also, merely as an amusing anecdote, Vasari himself tells us that Pietro could open his purse for the woman he loved, and dress her in the fairest and the costliest clothes, setting the pins and folds himself upon her headgear. In the latter part of his life, which was not without some shadow, he did paint for money, allowing soulless pictures to pass from his studio to the altars of believing monks and ladies; but his best work belongs to his earliest period, and there is no reason to believe that it was uninspired save by the inspiration of gold.

Concerning the second accusation--lack of faith--we have dealt with it at the end of Pietro's life, and we can only add here that the man must have been of super-human gentleness who could live through the scenes that Vannucci lived through, and maintain the faith of childhood.

The portrait in the Cambio is a stumbling block. The expression is heavy and unspiritual. This fact jars, and we resent it. (See frontispiece.)

But whatever Pietro's appearance, whatever his personal character may have been, he did two things: he left behind him an enduring mark in the history of art, and he gave the soul to that considerable school of painting from which young Raphael went forth into the wondering world, together with a host of other painters whose tendency was entirely in the direction of the spiritual and purifying elements in human life.

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Away to the southwest of Perugia, above the lakes of Trasimene and Chiusi, with a wide view southwards towards Rome, and northwards to Cortona, is the little Umbrian hill-town of Città della Pieve. It is so deeply buried in its oak woods that one can barely see it from the hills and plains around it. The town is very old and very sleepy, built of red bricks with hardly any stones, and scarcely any buildings of importance. The streets seem fallen dead asleep. "Why do you come here? The place is dead. Nothing ever happens in our city," said the melancholy daughter of the landlord, and the girl, by her unconscious words, explained the very reason of our visit.

Nothing ever happens in Città della Pieve. The town has fallen on sleep in its delightful landscape--on sleep as silent and profound as that of all the fossil shells in the banks along the roads which lead to it. But the place is strangely and marvellously beautiful; it holds the very essence of that intense religious charm peculiar to the landscapes of Umbria, and to the painters who have painted them; without exaggeration, we may say that the city looks to-day just exactly as it looked over four hundred years ago, at the time when, to the lovers of art, its history began and ended.[86]

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Pietro Vannucci de Castro Plebis _detto il Perugino_, was born at Città della Pieve in the year 1446. His parents were very poor, but they were of a good family and position. There were many children, and life was a struggle for bread in the small boy's home. When he was about eight, his father, Christoforo Vannucci, decided to educate him as a painter, and so he brought him to the city of Perugia, and there, as Vasari says, "this child, who had been reared in penury and want, was given as a shop drudge to a painter who was not particularly distinguished in his calling, but who held the art in great veneration, and highly honoured the men who excelled therein." The painter was probably Bonfigli, one of the most delightful artists of the Umbrian school, but Pietro must have gathered instruction from other sources too, from Fiorenzo di Lorenzo and Piero della Francesca, who we know were painting at that time. Maybe the boy met them at their work in churches, maybe he even travelled with them as a sort of journeyman. But it was probably Bonfigli who early inspired him with an ambitious desire to spread his wings in higher spheres of art than the little Umbrian town afforded him, and who gave him the worldly-wise advice retailed to us at some length by Vasari: Perugino must go to Florence,

"for the air of that city generates a desire for glory and honour, and gives a natural quickness to the perceptions of men. Yet it is true that when a man has acquired sufficient for his purposes in Florence, if he wishes to effect more than merely to live from day to day, as do the beasts that perish, and desires to become rich, he must depart from its boundaries and seek another market for the excellence of his works and for the reputation conferred on artists by that city. For the city of Florence treats her painters as Time treats her works, which, having perfected, he destroys, and by little and little gradually consumes."

Pietro listened to these naïve counsels; he drank them in and he followed them out to the letter. When quite a young man he started across the hills to Florence. He probably travelled as a journeyman, begging or earning his bread along the way. He reached Florence, entered the studio of Andrea Verrocchio, buried himself in a passionate study of his art, and, barely ten years after the date when, as an almost unknown artist, he had entered Florence with the secret of his genius in his soul, he left it again to go to Rome and paint a portion of the Sistine Chapel at the command of the reigning pope. Pietro studied in good schools and in excellently good society. In Florence he probably met with men like Botticelli, Credi, and certainly Leonardo da Vinci. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, is said to have written the following lines about the two young painters:

"Due giovan par d'etate e par d'amore Lionardo da Vinci, e 'l Perusino Pier della Pieve, ch'è un divin pittore."

Divine in truth were the two young men, for they were to be the fathers of the Lombard and the Umbrian schools of painting.

Perugino's earliest commissions for pictures were received in Florence, but nearly all the work of that period is lost. We cannot exaggerate the loss, but it is useless now to dwell on it and to describe the vanished frescoes of the Gesuati convent. Pietro was

called to Rome about the year 1483. There he painted several pictures on the walls of the Sistine chapel. Only two of them remain, and the figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment have long obliterated the sweet-faced Umbrian saints and landscapes which used to cover the east wall.[87] Having spent a little time in Rome, Perugino returned to his native land, and the best of his paintings belong to that period--namely to the years 1490-1502.

This is no place in which to describe the works of Perugino's prime. The world knows them and the capitals of Europe possess them, but from the city of Perugia, for which some of the very best were painted, they have been taken away by "_quel stupendo ladro_--Napoleone Bonaparte."[88] Perugino's fame spread like wildfire over the cities of Italy. "This _maestro Pietro_," says a very old chronicler, "was distinguished (_singolare_) in his art throughout the universal world." So intense was his fame and popularity, and his work in such demand, that it was impossible for him, for one single man, to supply all the work which men demanded of him. We should not therefore feel surprised at the number of second-rate pictures, planned by the master and carried out by his scholars, which have come down to us bearing his name.

From the period of his prime, Perugino perhaps went wrong--that is to say, he realised his own charms, specified, docketted them, stereotyped the smile of his saints and set his scholars working, so to speak, on the reproduction of the labels he himself had painted. His personality extended itself into a school, where, at times, it became mere caricature. Other stars had risen on the horizon, great and shining; some of them straight from the master's own workshop, some from other cities. There is a pitiful story told of the jealousy of the old Umbrian master for the growing fame of Michelangelo. It ended in a lawsuit from which Pietro withdrew his claims; but the tale may be unfounded, and we know that Vannucci praised the David when called to pass a judgment on it, we also know that he named one of his own children after the Tuscan sculptor.

But if we can recognise the later weakness of Perugino, the men who lived in his days and who openly declared him to be the master of masters never apparently recognised it. They seem to have worshipped his decadence as they had worshipped his dawn. They paid large sums for the feeble saints which rose like ghosts beneath his brush. They desired no better man to save them in the time of plague and bloodshed by the creation of a S. Sebastian which they might carry in procession, or a Madonna that they might kneel to. And truly to the end an ineffable sweetness, a religious amiability, is the undercurrent of the master's painting.

Pietro Vannucci died of the plague in the year 1523 at Fontignano, a small village near Perugia, where he had been called to paint a S. Sebastian in the time of pestilence. He was hurried into some desolate grave under an oak by the wayside, and he died, as they say, without faith of immortality, denying to the last that Saviour, whose face and figure, whose Mother and surroundings, he, of all men on earth, had striven through life to idealize.

So writes Vasari, but on this accusation we would pause. There may have been some sickness in Pietro's soul, we feel and see it in his work and portrait; but he had lived in terrible times and seen much evil and striven to paint much good. The fact that he was buried in unconsecrated ground proves literally nothing, for an old chronicler, describing the wretchedness of the times, combined with the terrors of the plague, tells us, "that such was the state of affairs, that the dead were paid as little attention to in those times as in our day we might give to goats or sheep; and that especially in the country where no one attended to anything, all died, almost without exception, not like men but almost like beasts; and as the consecrated ground did not suffice for burial they put the bodies into ditches, covering them up with a very little earth." Furthermore, "it was prohibited to visit the sick, and to attend the funerals of the dead." This being the case, how was it possible to find the corpse of one old man in order to lay it in consecrated ground? Pietro's sons tried hard to find it. We read of them: of Giambatisto, Francesco and Michaelangelo, searching diligently but in vain for their father's bones, that they might lay them in the Church of S. Agostino.[89]

Mariotti the chronicler of Perugino, whose loving and infinitely careful search has soothed, if it could not obliterate Vasari's spiteful words, ends his notes on Perugino with the following quotation from a Latin poet:--

"Se pictus moreris, non moriturus obis."

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It was just at the end of the period of Pietro's prime, namely, about the years 1499 to 1507, that he was commissioned to paint the walls of the Cambio. It is interesting to remember that at this time Perugino was in correspondence with the monks of Orvieto, who wished him to paint the frescoes in their Duomo. He had long dallied with his answer, he had certain other large works on hand, but when his fellow-citizens sent in their request that he should undertake this very considerable work for them he did not hesitate; he threw over his previous engagement, which, as we know, was magnificently taken up by Signorelli, and he at once set to work upon the walls of the Cambio.

Perugino was perhaps out of his element in this new undertaking. He had no choice of subjects, for they had been selected for him by the members of the Guild, who throughout show a most naïve interest and concern in the decoration of their rooms. These men were determined to secure the very best work they could; their seats, their panels, their doors were of the finest wood, worked by the most skilful carpenters and artists of the day. They were not wise in literature themselves, so they applied to the best scholar of their city, Francesco Matarazzo, for instructions, and it was he who most probably arranged the curious mixture of classic subjects and inscriptions which Perugino, with a certain child-like and ingenuous persistence, painted as he had painted all the familiar subjects of the Bible. For the ceiling of the audience chamber, which deals entirely with mythological figures, he may have consulted certain old illustrated missals in the Perugian archives; one of these, a Cicero (unhappily stolen from the library some years ago), very probably suggested some of the figures and beasts of the Zodiac which decorate the ceiling.

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The impression made upon one by the painting in the Cambio is very calm and pleasing. The whole is a harmony--a harmony of subjects sacred and profane such as the classic-loving minds of scholars in the days of the Renaissance delighted to create, and give to one of their purely religious artists to carry out successfully. The left wall is covered by two frescoes--two lines of figures--eight Romans and four Greeks. Behind these figures stretches the fair, calm, Umbrian landscape, dear to the heart of the Umbrian painter. In the sky above them are four female figures, Prudence and Justice, Fortitude and Temperance, and below them small angels hold the long inscription which is written over every group. Very soft and tender is Perugino's conception of Roman Emperors and Greek philosophers. They have the hands of women, their faces are sweet like the faces of saints. They look a little sad, and very gentle as they bend towards each other--not one of these men could have proved a ruler of nations. What did Perugino mean when he painted in the second group this visionary host of warriors? Surely he dreamed of some fair Umbrian girls that he had met in May along the lanes, but not of heroes. These youths, with their wonderful headgear and their long, limp bodies would have fallen as field flowers fall before the scythe or even a summer shower. That they are fair no one denies, and in the face of Cincinnatus there is a mysterious sweetness which disarms our criticism; but they are merely spiritual or imaginative portraits of the men whose names are carefully inscribed beneath them. The opposite wall is covered by a group of Prophets and of Sibyls--a combination which was not uncommon in later Christian art. To the left Isaiah, Moses, Daniel, David and Jeremiah, and opposite them the Persian, Cumaean, Lybian, Tyburtine and Delphic sibyls. Perugino crowned this most singular mixture of pagan and of Hebrew figures with a portrait of God the Father in glory. Many of the faces in this group are very beautiful, notably that of Daniel, which is said to be a portrait of young Raphael, and is a truly exquisite thing. Jeremiah is represented as a young and very melancholy man, and his face is said to be a portrait of Pinturicchio, but if this fact is true the likeness is much idealized.

In the two frescoes at the end of the room, namely, the Nativity and the Transfiguration, Pietro was in his old and dearer element. The former of these is a beautiful bit of his best religious work, but it has been terribly damaged by smoke, as the lamp of the Cambio used to hang beneath it.

There is some dispute as to whether Pietro worked alone at these frescoes. It appears almost certain that he did do so, with the exception, perhaps, of one of his scholars, l'Ingegno, who is said to have painted the face of Christ in the Transfiguration.[90] The ceiling, where the planets are painted in medallions, is perhaps the work of his school, although the drawings were entirely supplied by Perugino. Pinturicchio is said to have helped in the painting, and Raphael doubtless watched it with delight, and from it drew suggestions which he carried later to the Vatican. Delightful animals, dragons, and different birds pull the chariots of the various planets. The arabesques are infinitely varied, and form a study in themselves. Small boys and cherubs ride astride of dragons or of goats, and strange fantastic animals turn and twist themselves through flower stalks and bowls of fruits and flowers. Squirrels, peacocks, snakes, and many other known and unknown creatures, cover the arches like enamelled gems.

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It is curious to pass from Perugino's frescoes in the audience chamber of the Cambio to those of his pupil Giannicola Manni in the chapel of the same guild. Manni's work is very rare, and indeed it is barely seen outside Perugia.[91] He was a scholar of Perugino, and in his earlier years he followed in the steps of his master, but in later life he went to Florence and there acquired a love for the style of Andrea del Sarto. The influence of the two distinct schools of painting is strongly marked in the chapel of the Cambio, the ceiling of which was painted early in Manni's life, the walls after his return from Florence. Manni is a genial and attractive painter. He paints exactly as he pleases, regardless of religion or of history, and in his series of scenes from the life of S. John he gives us a set of luxurious human beings leading a very human cinque-cento life. The colour is bright, the figures portraits of the time. The ladies are very decolletées, fat, and dressed in comfortable gowns of the most beautiful stuffs and the simplest cut. One lady in the Nativity is particularly attractive. She wears a gorgeous gown of red; her fluffy yellow hair is neatly gathered in a net, embossed with bobs of the purest gold. S. Elizabeth, too, may be envied the splendour of her bed, and the looping of its heavy damask curtains. There is a sense of luxury, a sort of wanton abundance which is almost Venetian, throughout Manni's frescoes of the life of S. John. In the banquet scene, a dog and cat are preparing for a playful battle in the foreground of the picture. Had the Umbrian painter seen some canvasses of Veronese? Certainly he had wandered far afield from the early teaching which shows so clear upon the ceiling. He died in 1544, and most of his work, which we know to have consisted chiefly of banners, is lost to us, lost too, the painting of the city clock which Mariotti records for us with such minute precision.[92]

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On leaving the Cambio it would be well to look in at the Magistrate's audience chamber which opens on to the Corso two doors further on. It is a magnificent piece of Renaissance woodwork where every inch is exquisitely carved and finished. Perugia is rich in rare and lovely carvings, but nowhere more than in this single hall.