“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
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
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]
CHAPTER XI
The Museum,[104] and Tomb of the Volumnii
HAVING traced the first Etruscan walls and seen the tomb of the Volumnii, a note of sombre and half melancholy interest will inevitably have been struck upon our mind whilst trying to realise the lives of those mysterious people who created these things and left these dumb indications—dumb, because the language is so dead—upon the country where they lived and died. This note is of course by no means confined to the mind of the passing traveller. It is the people of the place itself who feel it most, and in Perugia, thanks to their efforts, we have, in the museum at the University, a very complete, if only a small collection of the relics of Etruscan civilization as found in the immediate neighbourhood. In a small book written by Signor Lupatelli upon the growth of the museum, we read that the noble families of the place have always loved to trace their earliest ancestors by carefully collecting any sarcophagi or other relics which they found upon their lands. In this way the Museum has been formed, and a crowd of tombs, laid open by the plough or winter rains, have been preserved with all their treasures in them.[105]
The study of the Etruscans is, after all, the study of the dead, and an Etruscan Museum has about it all the mysterious atmosphere of the tomb. What barrier greater, what ocean more profound, than that between ourselves and this dead people! Their tombs, their busts, their playthings and inscriptions seem to chill the very air around them. Ordinary people, not students of archæology, must face this fact quite boldly and come prepared to plunge head foremost into a very chilly atmosphere if they wish to learn about the ancient Etruscans. The present writers are bound to confess, that, on glad spring mornings, they have turned from the sarcophagi and the bronzes and terra-cotta vases in the cases to look with undisguised delight through the windows of the museum and up beyond to the brown roofs of the wicked old mediæval city opposite. The Duomo with all the blood upon its steps, the Piazza with all its passionate and burning history, seemed to them more real, more sympathetic, than the uneventful countenances, the harmless funereal urns, of this quiet race of men, who lived and died over one thousand years before our era.
“Les Tyrènes,” says M. André Lefèvre, “durant leur longue domination sont restés des étrangers, c’est ce qui explique pourquoi leur langue et leurs dieux ont disparu avec leur puissance, et pourquoi nous sommes réduits à fouiller leurs tombeaux pour connaître leur vie. C’est de leurs demeures funéraires que nous exhumons aujourd’hui leurs industries, leurs arts, leurs festins, leurs danses, leurs jeux, leurs pompeuses cérémonies triomphales, et leurs nuptiales, et aussi leur courte philosophie faite de fatalisme et d’insouciance.”
VIA DELLA PERA UNDER THE AQUEDUCT ON THE WAY TO THE
UNIVERSITY
It is probable that when the Rasenae first arrived in central Italy, they were still an almost barbarous nation, and that their arts and civilization were developed later in their northern settlements, in Tuscany and Umbria. They seem to have adopted little from the races who preceded them in Italy, though some say that they learned the art of statuary from these still more mysterious people; but, being, as we know, themselves a sea-faring nation they may have taken their first conceptions of art from the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, and in this way they might easily have come in contact with the art of Egypt and of Carthage. But by far the strongest influence was that of Greece. This they perhaps felt first in Greece itself, and later through their contact with Greek settlers in Italy.
The Etruscans were a receptive people; they easily grasped a new idea, and carried it out with careful precision, though with rounded edges, so to speak. The spirit of the inspiration of pure art is lacking in their work. They were excellent craftsmen, and Rome is said to have learned certain points in the uses of casting metal and in masonry from Etruscan artisans. They were also an agricultural people, who did much towards improving the soil wherever they settled. The Etruscans were a very religious, or at least a superstitious race, full of faith in augury, constantly consulting natural oracles, such as the flight of birds and variations of the atmosphere, and, like the Greeks, they had their household gods or lares. The Medusa’s head is for ever recurring in their monuments and on their house-doors. Having some strong belief in the immortality of the human soul, they crowded their dead with gifts, putting their most elaborate work upon the tombs, and giving to the corpse all the necessaries for a long journey to a distant land, or for a possible reawakening. They had different modes of burial. Usually the body was burned, but sometimes—and we have admirable instances of this in the Perugian Museum—it was simply buried in a stone sarcophagus. Women were respected and held a high position in society. This fact is clearly shown by their prominence upon the tombs, where they sit side by side with their husbands, as they were probably in the habit of doing at their feasts. The toilet was also respected, and the dead took as many pots of balsam to the grave as they took tear-bottles. The richer bodies have a wonderful array of dressing-table nicknacks at their head and feet, and the loveliest and most careful work in the whole museum is that upon the hand-mirrors (see Case 12, Room vi.), which were also probably laid in the tomb of the beloved dead.
The chief interest in this museum of Perugia is the wealth of its inscriptions. The passages are lined with them, and a catalogue or dictionary has been made of them. The Etruscans lived side by side with the Romans and the Greeks, and often we find inscriptions written in both languages upon one tomb; yet, though the two latter peoples were the greatest scholars of the world, the Etruscan language is dead to us for all practical purposes; and the longest Etruscan inscription which is known—the pride of the Perugian Museum—is little better than a blank wall to all who look to it for purposes of study.[106]
The Etruscans lived luxurious lives, but their race ran long upon the soil of Italy. As far as it can be traced, their rule, or at least their occupation, lasted for about twelve centuries. By the beginning of the Christian era they were already dying out.
M. André Lefèvre gives the following final summing up of the influence of the Etruscans upon the greater nation which gradually took their place:—
“Bien que, même aux temps de leur plus grande puissance ils n’aient pu imposer ni leur langue ni leurs dieux à des peuples établis depuis mille ans sur le sol Italien, leur part n’en a pas moins été considérable dans la civilisation Latine. Leur influence a été moindre sur les hommes que sur les choses, sur l’esprit que sur les formes extérieures, cérémonielles et rituelles,—qui, à leur tour, affectent les institutions et les moeurs. Ils ont appris aux Romains à bâtir des maisons et des temples, à ordonner les festins, les processions, les pompes triomphales et les jeux sanglants du cirque. Les meubles, les sièges, les statues, les licteurs, le costume, la bulle d’or des enfants patriciens, sont aussi d’origine Étrusque. Enfin, ils ont ajouté aux superstitions déja si nombreuses des Latins et des Sabins la science, si ce n’est pas profaner un tel mot, la science augurale, élevée au rang d’institution politique, perpétuant ainsi, au sein d’une civilisation avancée, les plus niaises pratiques de la sauvagerie la plus infinie.”
As it would have been impossible in the slight scope of this small book to give any detailed account of the different objects in the Perugian museum, we have thought it wiser to offer the above sketch of the Etruscans themselves, adding only some promiscuous notes about the collections for those who care to read them as they pass through the different rooms. The new Catalogue by Signor Donati, the profound works of Count Conestabile and Signor Vermiglioli, and the delightful chapter in Dennis’ Etruria contain all the information that a genuine student will desire.
Room II.
Case A.
No. 5. A Medusa’s head in terra-cotta; exquisite and of unusually careful workmanship. This head was probably one of those plaques or tablets which were put up by the Etruscans over the lintel of their house-doors to keep away the evil spirits. The Medusa is commonly used in this way, and we find her constantly in tombs and other places. Her face is usually calm, and often lovely, though in this instance it is calculated to strike terror, as well as admiration, into the mind of any witch or evil spirit. Beside it are two tablets of the same sort, but much coarser in treatment and design, and apparently worked under Egyptian influences.
No. 12. Some charming pieces of Etruscan glass; small tear and balsam bottles; also some larger bottles, square in form. These latter were probably used for medicines. Their chief interest lies in the fact that they bear the stamp of their Etruscan makers.
No. 6. A row of terra-cotta pateræ, such as the dead hold in their hands on tombs.
No. 9. A plateful of little glass balls, which shine like handfuls of the most lustrous emeralds and opals in the dim light of the Museum. These were used as counters by the Etruscans in their games of dice, and it is thought that they were put into the graves of habitual gamblers, so that the soul of the dead man, during its passage to eternity, should not be denied the consolation of its favourite diversion.
No. 27. Some beautiful fragments of feet, heads, and arms. It has been supposed that the Etruscans often made whole statues of wood or of some such cheap material, only giving to the extremities the careful work required by terra-cotta. Hence these apparently disconnected relics.
Cases B. and C.
Most of the objects in this case came from Chiusi and are made of the black ware called bucchero. Some are Etruscan, some of an even earlier origin. All along the top of the case are some quite simple cinerary urns of a different form to the vases inside the cases, which latter were designed more for decoration in rich men’s houses.
No. 5. Two beautiful trays or toilet tables belonging to the Etruscan ladies. Looking at these one seems to understand the elaborate wigs on the heads of those ladies who smile upon the tops of their sarcophagi. Several objects in Case D. explain them further.
No. 4. A lovely line of graceful vases, good illustrations of the imitative power of the Etruscans. Not only the forms, but even the shining texture of the Grecian bronze, is here copied in bucchero.
No. 8. These vases are the work of those people who preceded the Etruscans in Umbria. The forms are simple, the patterns purely geometrical.
Case D
Nos. 2, 3. Some quite common earthenware urns for the ashes of the poor who could neither afford tombs nor inscriptions. On one or two of these a name is scratched in rough black paint, probably with the finger, and as a last token to the dead from someone who had loved him.
No. 7. Some earthenware bottles corresponding to the beautiful glass ones in Case A: those in earthenware were used for the tombs of the poor.