CHAPTER VI--PAINTING

The Renaissance, so far as Painting is concerned, may be said to have culminated between the years 1470 and 1550. These dates, it must be frankly admitted, are arbitrary; nor is there anything more unprofitable than the attempt to define by strict chronology the moments of an intellectual growth so complex, so unequally progressive, and so varied as that of Italian art. All that the historian can hope to do, is to strike a mean between his reckoning of years and his more subtle calculations based on the emergence of decisive genius in special men. An instance of such compromise is afforded by Lionardo da Vinci, who belongs, as far as dates go, to the last half of the fifteenth century, but who must, on any estimate of his achievement, be classed with Michael Angelo among the final and supreme masters of the full Renaissance. To violate the order of time, with a view to what may here be called the morphology of Italian art, is, in his case, a plain duty.

The painters of the second group display mastery more perfect, range of faculty more all-embracing. What they design they do; nature and art obey them equally; the resources placed at their command are employed with facile and unfettered exercise of power. The hand obedient to the brain is now so expert that nothing further is left to be desired in the expression of the artist's thought.^[197] The student can only hope to penetrate the master's meaning. To imagine a step further in the same direction is impossible. The full flower of the Italian genius has been unfolded. Its message to the world in art has been delivered.

Chronology alone would not justify us in drawing these distinctions. What really separates the two groups is the different degree in which they severally absorbed the spirit and uttered the message of their age. In the former the Renaissance was still immature, in the latter it was perfected. Yet all these painters deserve in a true sense to be called its children. Their common object is art regarded as an independent function, and relieved from the bondage of technical impediments. In their work the liberty of the modern mind finds its first and noblest expression. They deal with familiar and time-honoured Christian motives reverently; but they use them at the same time for the exhibition of pure human beauty. Pagan influences yield them spirit-stirring inspiration; yet the antique models of style, which proved no less embarrassing to their successors than Saul's armour was to David, weigh lightly, like a magician's breast-plate, upon their heroic strength.

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua in 1431. Vasari says that in his boyhood he herded cattle, and it is probable that he was the son of a small Lombard farmer. What led him to the study of the arts we do not know; but that his talents were precociously developed, is proved by his registration in 1441 upon the books of the painter's guild at Padua. He is there described as the adopted son of Squarcione. At the age of seventeen he signed a picture with his name. Studying the casts and drawings collected by Squarcione for his Paduan school, the young Mantegna found congenial exercise for his peculiar gifts.^[198] His early frescoes in the Eremitani at Padua look as though they had been painted from statues or clay models, carefully selected for the grandeur of their forms, the nobility of their attitudes, and the complicated beauty of their drapery. The figures, arranged on different planes, are perfect in their perspective; the action is indicated by appropriate gestures, and the colouring, though faint and cold, is scientifically calculated. Yet not a man or woman in these wondrous compositions seems to live. Well provided with bone and muscle, they have neither blood nor anything suggestive of the breath of life within them. It is as though Mantegna had been called to paint a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid their various occupations, and preserved for centuries from injury in some Egyptian solitude of dewless sand.

The truth is that Mantegna's inspiration was derived from the antique.^[199] The beauty of classical bas-relief entered deep into his soul and ruled his imagination. In later life he spent his acquired wealth in forming a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities.^[200] He was, moreover, the friend of students, eagerly absorbing the knowledge brought to light by Ciriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, and other antiquaries; and so completely did he assimilate the materials of scholarship, that the spirit of a Roman seemed to be re-incarnated in him. Thus, independently of his high value as a painter, he embodies for us in art that sincere passion for the ancient world which was the dominating intellectual impulse of his age.

The minute learning accumulated in the fifteenth century upon the subject of Roman military life found noble illustration in his frieze of "Julius Cæsar's Triumph."^[201] Nor is this masterpiece a cold display of pedantry. The life we vainly look for in the frescoes of the Eremitani chapel may be found here—statuesque, indeed, in style, and stately in movement, but glowing with the spirit of revived antiquity. The processional pomp of legionaries bowed beneath their trophied arms, the monumental majesty of robed citizens, the gravity of stoled and veiled priests, the beauty of young slaves, and all the paraphernalia of spoils and wreaths and elephants and ensigns are massed together with the self-restraint of noble art subordinating pageantry to rules of lofty composition. What must the genius of the man have been who could move thus majestically beneath the weight of painfully accumulated erudition, converting an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line composed in the grave Dorian mood?

By no process can the classic purity of this bas-relief be better understood than by comparing the original with a transcript made by Rubens from a portion of the "Triumph."^[202] The Flemish painter strives to add richness to the scene by Bacchanalian riot and the sensuality of imperial Rome. His elephants twist their trunks, and trumpet to the din of cymbals; negroes feed the flaming candelabra with scattered frankincense; the white oxen of Clitumnus are loaded with gaudy flowers, and the dancing maidens are dishevelled Mænads. But the rhythmic procession of Mantegna, modulated to the sound of flutes and soft recorders, carries our imagination back to the best days and strength of Rome. His priests and generals, captives and choric women, are as little Greek as they are modern. In them awakes to a new life the spirit-quelling energy of the republic. The painter's severe taste keeps out of sight the insolence and orgies of the empire; he conceives Rome as Shakspeare did in "Coriolanus."^[203]

In compositions of this type, studied after bas-reliefs and friezes, Mantegna displayed a power that was unique. Those who have once seen his drawings for Judith with the head of Holofernes, and for Solomon judging between the two mothers, will never forget their sculpture. The lines are graven on our memory. When this marble master chose to be tragic, his intensity was terrible. The designs for a dead Christ carried to the tomb among the weeping Maries, concentrate within the briefest space the utmost agony; it is as though the very ecstasy of grief had been congealed and fixed for ever. What, again, he could produce of purely beautiful within the region of religious art, is shown by his "Madonna of the Victory."^[204] No other painter has given to the soldier saints forms at once so heroic and so chivalrously tender.

With regard to the circumstances of Mantegna's biography, it may be said briefly that, though of humble birth, he spent the greater portion of his life at Court and in the service of princes. It was in 1456, after he had distinguished himself by the Paduan frescoes, that he first received an invitation from the Marquis Lodovico Gonzaga. Of this sovereign I have already had occasion to speak.^[205] Reared by Vittorino da Feltre, to whom his father had committed almost unlimited authority, Lodovico had early learned to estimate the real advantages of culture. It was now his object to render his capital no less illustrious by art than by the residence of learned men. With this view he offered Mantegna a salary of fifteen ducats a month, together with lodging, corn, and fuel—provided the painter would place his talents at his service. Mantegna accepted the invitation; but numerous engagements prevented him from transferring his household from Padua to Mantua until the year 1460. From that date onwards to 1506, when he died, Mantegna remained attached to the Gonzaga family serving three Marquises in succession, and adorning their palaces, chapels, and country-seats with frescoes now, alas! almost entirely ruined. The grants of land and presents he received in addition to his salary, enabled him to build a villa at Buscoldo, where he resided during the summer, as well as to erect a sumptuous mansion in the capital.

Between Mantua, Goito, and Buscoldo, Mantegna spent the last forty-six years of his life in continual employment, broken only by a short visit to Florence in 1466, and another to Bologna in 1472,^[206] and by a longer residence in Rome between the years 1488 and 1490. During the latter period Innocent VIII. was Pope. He had built a chapel in the Belvedere of the Vatican, and wished the greatest painter of the day to decorate it. Therefore he wrote to Francesco, Marquis of Mantua, requesting that he might avail himself of Mantegna's skill. Francesco, though unwilling to part with his painter in ordinary, thought it unadvisable to disappoint the Pope. Accordingly he dubbed Mantegna knight, and sent him to Rome. The chapel painted in fresco for Innocent was ruthlessly destroyed by Pius VI.; and thus the world has lost one of Mantegna's masterpieces, executed while his genius was at its zenith. On his return to Mantua he finished the decorations of the Castello of the Gonzaghi, and completed his greatest surviving work, the "Triumph of Julius Cæsar."

By his wife, Nicolosia, the sister of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Mantegna had several children, one of whom, Francesco, adopted painting as a trade. The great artist was by temper arrogant and haughty; nor could he succeed in living peaceably with any of his neighbours. It appears that he spent habitually more money than he could well afford, freely indulging his taste for magnificence, and disbursing large sums in the purchase of curiosities. Long before his death his estate had been involved in debt; and after his decease, his sons were forced to sell the pictures in his studio for the payment of pressing creditors. He was buried in Alberti's church of S. Andrea at Mantua, in a chapel decorated at his own expense. Over the grave was placed a bronze bust, most noble in modelling and perfect in execution. The broad forehead with its deeply cloven furrows, the stern and piercing eyes, the large lips compressed with nervous energy, the massive nose, the strength of jaw and chin, and the superb clusters of the hair escaping from a laurel-wreath upon the royal head, are such as realise for us our notion of a Roman in the days of the Republic. Mantegna's own genius has inspired this masterpiece, which tradition assigns to the medallist Sperando Maglioli. Whoever wrought it, must have felt the incubation of the mighty painter's spirit, and have striven to express in bronze the character of his uncompromising art.

Of a different temperament, yet not wholly unlike Mantegna in a certain iron strength of artistic character, was Luca Signorelli, born about 1441 at Cortona. The supreme quality of Mantegna was studied purity of outline, severe and heightened style. As Landor is distinguished by concentration above all the English poets who have made trial of the classic Muse, so Mantegna holds a place apart among Italian painters because of his stern Roman self-control. Signorelli, on the contrary, made his mark by boldness, pushing experiment almost beyond the verge of truth, and approaching Michael Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavour to outdo nature. Vasari says of him, that "even Michael Angelo imitated the manner of Luca, as every one can see;" and indeed Signorelli anticipated the greatest master of the sixteenth century, not only in his profound study of human anatomy, but also in his resolution to express high thought and tragic passion by pure form, discarding all the minor charms of painting. Trained in the severe school of Piero della Francesca, he early learned to draw from the nude with boldness and accuracy; and to this point, too much neglected by his predecessors, he devoted the full powers of his maturity. Anatomy he practised, according to the custom of those days, in the graveyard or beneath the gibbet. There is a drawing by him in the Louvre of a stalwart man carrying upon his back the corpse of a youth. Both are naked. The motive seems to have been taken from some lazar-house. Life-long study of perspective in its application to the drawing of the figure, made the difficulties of foreshortening and the delineation of brusque attitude mere child's play to this audacious genius. The most rapid movement, the most perilous contortion of bodies falling through the air or flying, he depicted with hard, firmly-traced, unerring outline. If we dare to criticise the productions of a master so original and so accomplished, all we can say is that Signorelli revelled almost too wantonly in the display of hazardous posture, and that he sacrificed the passion of his theme to the display of science.^[207] Yet his genius comprehended great and tragic subjects, and to him belongs the credit in an age of ornament and pedantry of having made the human body a language for the utterance of all that is most weighty in the thought of man.

A story is told by Vasari which brings Signorelli very close to our sympathy, and enables us to understand the fascination of pure form he felt so deeply. "It is related of Luca that he had a son killed at Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face and person, whom he had tenderly loved. In his grief the father caused the boy to be stripped naked, and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering no complaint and shedding no tear, he painted the portrait of his dead son, to the end that he might still be able, through the work of his own hand, to contemplate that which nature had given him, but which an adverse fortune had taken away." So passionate and ardent, so convinced of the indissoluble bond between the soul he loved in life and its dead tenement of clay, and withal so iron-nerved and stout of will, it behoved that man to be, who undertook in the plenitude of his power, at the age of sixty, to paint upon the walls of the chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto the images of Doomsday, Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell.^[208]

It is a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of that forlorn Papal city—gloomy by reason of bad lighting, but more so because of the terrible shapes with which Signorelli has filled it^[209]. In no other work of the Italian Renaissance, except in the Sistine Chapel, has so much thought, engaged upon the most momentous subjects, been expressed with greater force by means more simple and with effect more overwhelming. Architecture, landscape, and decorative accessories of every kind, the usual padding of quattrocento pictures, have been discarded from the main compositions. The painter has relied solely upon his power of imagining and delineating the human form in every attitude, and under the most various conditions. Darting like hawks or swallows through the air, huddling together to shun the outpoured vials of the wrath of God, writhing with demons on the floor of Hell, struggling into new life from the clinging clay, standing beneath the footstool of the Judge, floating with lute and viol on the winds of Paradise, kneeling in prayer, or clasping "inseparable hands with joy and bliss in overmeasure for ever"—these multitudes of living beings, angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the impression of controlling doom the more appalling, is that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the dead arise, and weal and woe are portioned to the saved and damned, is Himself unrepresented.^[210] We breathe in the presence of embodied consciences, submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable will.

It would be doing Signorelli injustice at Orvieto to study only these great panels. The details with which he has filled all the vacant spaces above the chapel stalls and round the doorway, throw new light upon his power. The ostensible motive for this elaborate ornamentation is contained in the portraits of six poets, who are probably Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, and Dante, il sesto tra cotanto senno.^[211] But the portraits themselves, though vigorously conceived and remarkable for bold foreshortening, are the least part of the whole design. Its originality consists in the arabesques, medallions, and chiaroscuro bas-reliefs, where the human form, treated as absolutely plastic, supplies the sole decorative element. The pilasters by the doorway, for example, are composed, after the usual type of Italian grotteschi, in imitation of antique candelabra, with numerous stages for the exhibition of the artist's fancies. Unlike the work of Raphael in the Loggie, these pilasters of Signorelli show no birds or beasts, no flowers or foliage, fruits or fauns, no masks or sphinxes. They are crowded with naked men—drinking, dancing, leaning forward, twisting themselves into strange attitudes, and adapting their bodies to the several degrees of the framework. The same may be said of the arabesques around the portraits of the poets, where men, women, and children, some complete, some ending in foliage or in fish-tails, are lavished with a wild and terrible profusion. Hippogriffs and centaurs, sirens and dolphins, are here used as adjuncts to humanity. Amid this fantastic labyrinth of twisted forms we find medallions painted in chiaroscuro with subjects taken chiefly from Ovidian and Dantesque mythology. Here every attitude of men in combat and in motion has been studied from the nude, and multitudes of figures draped and undraped are compressed into the briefest compass. All but the human form is sternly eliminated; and the body itself is treated with a mastery and a boldness that prove Signorelli to have held its varied capabilities firmly in his brain. He could not have worked out all those postures from the living model. He played freely with his immense stores of knowledge; but his play was the pastime of a Prometheus. Each pose, however hazardous, carries conviction with it of sincerity and truth; the life and liberty of nature reign throughout. From the whole maze of interlaced and wrestling figures the terrible nature of the artist's genius shines forth. They are almost all strong men in the prime or past the prime of life, chosen for their salient display of vital structure. Signorelli was the first, and, with the exception of Michael Angelo, the last painter thus to use the body, without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any second intention whatsoever, as the supreme decorative principle. In his absolute sincerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard and rugged types, scorning to introduce an element of beauty, whether sensuous or ideal, that should distract him from the study of the body in and for itself. This distinguishes him in the arabesques at Orvieto alike from Mantegna and Michael Angelo, from Correggio and Raphael, from Titian and Paolo Veronese.

This point is so important for its bearing on Renaissance art that I may be permitted to dilate at greater length on Signorelli's choice of types and treatment of form in general. Having a special predilection for the human body, he by no means confined himself to monotony in its presentation. On the contrary, we can trace many distinct grades of corporeal expression. First comes the abstract nude, illustrated by the "Resurrection" and the arabesques at Orvieto^[212]. Contemporary life, with all its pomp of costume and insolence of ruffling youth, is depicted in the "Fulminati" at Orvieto and in the "Soldiers of Totila" at Monte Oliveto^[213]. These transcripts from the courts of princes and camps of condottieri are invaluable as portraits of the lawless young men who filled Italy with the noise of their feuds and the violence of their adventures. They illustrate Matarazzo's Perugian chronicle better than any other Renaissance pictures; for in frescoes like those of Pinturicchio at Siena the same qualities are softened to suit the painter's predetermined harmony, whereas Signorelli rejoices in their pure untempered character^[214]. These, then, form a second stage. Third in degree we find the type of highly idealised adolescence reserved by Signorelli for his angels. All his science and his sympathy with real life are here subordinated to poetic feeling. It is a mistake to say that these angels are the young men of Umbria whom he loved to paint in their striped jackets, with the addition of wings to their shoulders. The radiant beings who tune their citherns on the clouds of Paradise, or scatter roses for elect souls, could not live and breathe in the fiery atmosphere of sensuous passions to which the Baglioni were habituated. A grave and solemn sense of beauty animates these fair male beings, clothed in voluminous drapery, with youthful faces and still earnest eyes. Their melody, like that of Milton, is severe. Nor are Signorelli's angelic beings of one uniform type like the angels of Fra Angelico. The athletic cherubs of the "Resurrection," breathing their whole strength into the trumpets that awake the dead; the mailed and winged warriors, keeping guard above the pit of "Hell," that none may break their prison-bars among the damned; the lute-players of "Paradise," with their almost feminine sobriety of movement; the flame-breathing seraphs of the day of doom; the "Gabriel" of Volterra, in whom strength is translated into swiftness:—these are the heralds, sentinels, musicians, executioners, and messengers of the celestial court; and each class is distinguished by appropriate physical characteristics. At the other end of the scale, forming a fourth grade, we may mention the depraved types of humanity chosen for his demons—those greenish, reddish, ochreish fiends of the "Inferno," whom Signorelli created by exaggerating the more grotesque qualities of the nude developed in his arabesques. We thus obtain four several degrees of form: the demoniac, the abstract nude, the adolescent beauty of young men copied from choice models, and the angelic.

Except in his angels, Signorelli was comparatively indifferent to what is commonly considered beauty. He was not careful to select his models, or to idealise their type. The naked human body, apart from facial distinction or refinement of form, contented him. Violent contrasts of light and shadow, accentuating the anatomical structure with rough and angular decision, give the effect of illustrative diagrams to his studies. Harmony of proportion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to energy emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant life, in sinewy limbs, in the proud carriage of the head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk backward from the reins, the firmly planted calves and brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad shoulders, spare flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of a man of twenty-two or upwards, whose growth has been confined to the development of animal force, was what delighted him. Yet there is no coarseness or animalism properly so called in his style. He was attracted by the marvellous mechanism of the human frame—its goodliness regarded as the most highly organised of animate existences.

Before quitting the frescoes at Orvieto, some attention should be paid to the medallions spoken of above, in special relation to the classicism of the earlier Renaissance. Scenes from Dante's "Purgatorio" and subjects from the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid are treated here in the same key; but the latter, since they engaged Signorelli's fancy upon Greek mythology, are the more important for our purpose. Two from the legend of "Orpheus" and two from that of "Proserpine" might be chosen as typical of the whole series. Mediæval intensity, curiously at variance with antique feeling, is discernible throughout. The satellites of Hades are gaunt and sinewy devils, eager to do violence to Eurydice. Pluto himself drives his jarring car-wheels up through the lava-blocks and flames of Etna with a fury and a vehemence we seek in vain upon antique sarcophagi. Ceres, wandering through Sicily in search of her lost daughter, is a gaunt witch with dishevelled hair, raising frantic hands to tear her cheeks; while the snakes that draw her chariot are no grave symbols of the germinating corn, but greedy serpents ready to spit fire against the ravishers of Proserpine. Thus the tranquillity and self-restraint of Greek art yield to a passionate and trenchant realisation of the actual romance. The most thrilling moments in the legend are selected for dramatic treatment, grace and beauty being exchanged for vivid presentation. A whole cycle of human experience separates these medallions from the antique bas-relief at Naples, where Hermes hands the veiled Eurydice to Orpheus, and all three are calm. That Signorelli, if he chose to do so, could represent a classic myth with more of classic feeling, is shown by his picture of "Pan Listening to Olympus"^[215]. The nymph, the vineleaf-girdled Faun, and the two shepherds, all undraped and drawn with subtle feeling for the melodies of line, render this work one of his most successful compositions.

It would be interesting to compare Signorelli's treatment of the antique with Mantegna's or Botticelli's. The visions of the pagan world, floating before the mind of all men in the fifteenth century, found very different interpreters in these three painters—Botticelli adding the quaint alloy of his own fancy, Signorelli imparting the semi-savagery of a terrible imagination, Mantegna, with the truest instinct and the firmest touch, confining himself to the processional pageantry of bas-relief. Yet, were this comparison to be instituted, we could hardly refrain from carrying it much further. Each great master of the Renaissance had his own relation to classical mythology. The mystic sympathies of "Leda and the Swan," as imaged severally by Lionardo and Michael Angelo; Correggio's romantic handling of the myths of "Danaë" and "Io;" Titian's and Tintoretto's rival pictures of "Bacchus and Ariadne;" Raphael's "Galatea;" Pollajuolo's "Hercules;" the "Europa" of Veronese; the "Circe" of Dosso Dossi; Palma's "Venus;" Sodoma's "Marriage of Alexander"—all these, to mention none but pictures familiar to every traveller in Italy, raise for the student of the classical Revival absorbing questions relative to the influences of pagan myths upon the modern imagination.

Unlike Mantegna, Signorelli never entered the service of a prince, though we have seen that he executed commissions for Lorenzo de' Medici and Pandolfo Petrucci. He bore a name which, if not noble, had been more than once distinguished in the annals of Tuscany. Residing at his native place, Cortona, he there enjoyed the highest reputation, and was frequently elected to municipal office. Concerning his domestic life very little is known, but what we do know is derived from an excellent source^[216]. His mother was the sister of Lazzaro, great-grandfather of Giorgio Vasari. In his biography of Signorelli, Vasari relates how, when he was himself a boy of eight, his illustrious cousin visited the house of the Vasari family at Arezzo; and hearing from little Giorgio's grammar-master that he spent his time in drawing figures, Luca turned to the child's father and said, "Antonio, since Giorgio takes after his family, you must by all means have him taught; for even though he should pay attention to literature as well, drawing cannot fail to be a source of utility, honour, and recreation to him, as it is to every man of worth." Luca's kindness deeply impressed the boy, who afterwards wrote the following description of his personal qualities: "He was a man of the most excellent habits, sincere and affectionate with his friends, sweet of conversation and amusing in society, above all things courteous to those who had need of his work, and easy in giving instruction to his pupils. He lived splendidly, and took delight in dressing handsomely. This excellent disposition caused him to be always held in highest veneration both in his own city and abroad."

To turn from Signorelli to Perugino is to plunge at once into a very different atmosphere^[217]. It is like quitting the rugged gorges of high mountains for a valley of the Southern Alps—still, pensive, beautiful, and coloured with reflections from an evening sky. Perugino knew exactly how to represent a certain mood of religious sentiment, blending meek acquiescence with a prayerful yearning of the impassioned soul. His Madonnas worshipping the infant Jesus in a tranquil Umbrian landscape, his angels ministrant, his pathetic martyrs with upturned holy faces, his sexless S. Sebastians and immaculate S. Michaels, display the perfection of art able by colour and by form to achieve within a narrow range what it desires. What this artist seems to have aimed at, was to create for the soul amid the pomps and passions of this world a resting-place of contemplation tenanted by saintly and seraphic beings. No pain comes near the folk of his celestial city; no longing poisons their repose; they are not weary, and the wicked trouble them no more. Their cheerfulness is no less perfect than their serenity; like the shades of Hellas, they have drunk Lethean waters from the river of content, and all remembrance of things sad or harsh has vanished from their minds. The quietude of holiness expressed in this ideal region was a legacy to Perugino from earlier Umbrian masters; but his technical supremacy in fresco-painting and in oils, his correct drawing within certain limits, and his refined sense of colour enabled him to realise it more completely than his less accomplished predecessors. In his best work the Renaissance set the seal of absolute perfection upon pietistic art.

We English are fortunate in possessing one of Perugino's sincerest devotional oil pictures^[218]. His frescoes of "S. Sebastian" at Panicale, and of the "Crucifixion" at Florence, are tolerably well known through reproductions^[219]; while the "Vision of S. Bernard" at Munich and the "Pietà" in the Pitti Gallery are familiar to all travelled students of Italian painting. These masterpieces belong to Perugino's best period, when his inspiration was fresh, and his enthusiasm for artistic excellence was still unimpaired; and when, as M. Rio thinks, the failure of his faith had not yet happened. It is only at Perugia, however, in the Sala del Cambio, that we are able to gauge the extent of his power and to estimate the value of his achievement beyond the pale of strictly religious themes.

Early in the course of his career Perugino seems to have become contented with a formal repetition of successful motives, and to have checked the growth of his genius by adhering closely to a prescribed cycle of effects. The praises of his patrons and the prosperity of his trade proved to his keen commercial sense that the raised ecstatic eyes, the upturned oval faces, the pale olive skin, the head inclined upon the shoulder, the thin fluttering hair, the ribands and the dainty dresses of his holy persons found great favour in Umbrian palaces and convents. Thenceforward he painted but little else; and when, in the Sala del Cambio, he was obliged to treat the representative heroes of Greek and Roman story, he adopted the same manner^[220]. Leonidas, the lionhearted Spartan, and Cato, the austere Roman, who preferred liberty to life, bend their mild heads like flowers in Perugino's frescoes, and gather up their drapery in studied folds with celestial delicacy. Jove is a reproduction of the Eterno Padre, conceived as a benevolent old man for a conventional painting of the "Trinity;" and Ganymede is a page-boy with the sweet submissive features of Tobias. Already Perugino had opened a manufactory of pietistic pictures, and was employing many pupils on his works. He coined money by fixing artificially beautiful faces upon artificially elegant figures, placing a row of these puppets in a landscape with calm sky behind them, and calling the composition by the name of some familiar scene. His inspiration was dead, his invention exhausted; his chief object seemed to be to make his trade thrive.