GENTILE DA FABRIANO
1360 - 1428

The Umbrian School was an offspring of the Sienese, which we have already seen, under Duccio, greatly affected early Florentine endeavour, to fall away from Florence again into an achievement wholly apart. As the art of Umbria was to be akin to the art of Siena, so we have the people of Perugia akin to the people of Siena-pietistic, passionate, hotly emotional, quick to love or hate. Perugia, too, was torn with the quarrels of the factions-the savage and brutal feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni-at war with Assisi, exhausted at last by discord. Art revealed itself to Umbria towards the close of the thirteen-hundreds through the personality and genius of GENTILE DA FABRIANO (1360-1428), and, above all, in his Adoration of the Magi, at the Academy in Florence, which has all the freshness of youth, gay and debonair colour, and blithe narrative, and in his Madonna in Glory at the Brera in Milan.

Now Gentile da Fabriano had been to Venice, and [171] there had worked with his friend Pisanello, of Verona, the famed engraver of medals, a superb draughtsman, and quick of eye, who was the first Italian to catch and hold and truly give forth the movements of animals. From the Rhine had come to Venice, about 1450, the painter Roger van der Weyden, who saw and sang the praises of Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano, seeing in them both gifts akin to his own. How much of Gothic joy in nature and love of life the great Northerner gave to them, and how much of Venetian colour and pomp and circumstance he took back with him to Flanders, who may tell ? Verona, too, was in close touch with the Court of Burgundy ; indeed, as early as 1400, Philip the Bold had bought Italian medals. The forerunners of the Van Eycks, even Hubert Van Eyck himself, learned many lessons from Venice and the northern cities near the lagoons ; but their travels thereto had brought Flemish art also into Italy.

Gentile da Fabriano seemed destined to rise and achieve his blithe record of the bright and pleasant life of his day, and to die, and Umbrian art to die with him, scarce stepping out of its half-Gothic beginnings, and his joy of life and glorious colour to be doomed to arouse no further achievement amongst the Umbrian hills. LORENZO DA SAN SEVERINO seems alone to have come to any distinction after him. But there came to the Umbrian towns, above all to Perugia, some impetus that, in the latter half of the fourteen-hundreds, created a school of painting wholly unlike that of Florence. Already stimulated by the blithe and colourful genius of Venice, through Gentile da Fabriano, Umbria took to herself something of the Sienese tradition, and uttered herself with a suave and generous faculty of colour and emotion in marked contrast, as though in deliberate challenge, to the austere grace of the Florentines. Fresh of vision, poetic [172] and splendid, with something of Sienese limitation in the range of their art, the Umbrians frankly passed by the intellectual and tragic grandeur of the genius of Florence.

There had come to Orvieto with Fra Angelico, as his assistant, Benozzo Gozzoli ; and Benozzo Gozzoli stayed behind and worked amongst the Umbrian cities. He brought new spirit into the declining life of Umbrian painting ; revealing the more colourful side of the Florentine genius to BENEDETTO BONFIGLI (1425?-1496), Niccolo da Foligno (1430?-1502), and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo (1440-1522). Of these, Benedetto Benfigli was clearly indebted to Lorenzo da San Severino, through one GIOVANNI BOCCATIS ; born in Perugia, where most of his work is to be seen, he caught from Benozzo Gozzoli his taste for painting into his works the facts and habits of the life of his day. Benozzo Gozzoli's influence is even more marked in the art of Niccolo da Foligno; but in him was strongly developed that sincere and marked emotionalism of the Umbrian and Sienese schools, exaggerated from the tenderness and gentleness typical of these schools into more violent passion. In was, however, in FIORENZO DI LORENZO that Perugia found her first master of mark, though little is known of his life, and he is only mentioned by Vasari, unnamed, as Perugino's first master. Whether, as his work would seem to show, he learnt his craft under Benedetto Bonfigli, and afterwards came under the influence of Benozzo Gozzoli and then of Antonio Poliamolo, or not, he reveals a vision for depth of atmosphere and for painting his landscape backgrounds in tune with his figures, perhaps compelled upon his eyes by the clear air of the Umbrian hills, which were to have such a marked effect on the style of Perugino and the Umbrian School. He had, besides, a firm grip of character, and a strong feeling for creating it. [173]Fiorenzo is seen at his best in his Annunciation upon the wall of the church of S. Maria degli Angeli at Assisi, and in The Nativity and Adoration of the Magi, and the small lunette, amongst several paintings, at the Gallery in Perugia.

Fiorenzo's most brilliant pupils, Pietro Vannucci and Bernardino di Betto, were to be known in after years as Perugino and Pinturicchio, who developed their master's fine style and brought immortal fame to the picturesque hill-city of Umbria.