PERUGINO
1446 - 1523

PIETRO VANNUCCI, to become world-renowned as PERUGINO, was born in 1446 in a small mountain-town of Umbria, called Città della Pieve, near by Perugia. One of a large and very poor family, Pietro Vannucci was sent off, a mere child of nine, to the studio of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo in Perugia, to learn the craft and mystery of painting, wherefore his name of " il Perugino." Grown to youth, he went to Florence to complete his training, and thus came to work side by side with Leonardo da Vinci in the workship of Verrocchio.

Perugino early rose to repute, and his work to wide demand; he was soon so overwhelmed with orders that he could not even attempt to carry out many of them, though he had workshops both in Florence and Perugia, employing a large number of pupils and assistants. This accounts for much in the limitation of Perugino's promise, for Perugino was an astoundingly prolific worker; his art inevitably suffered both from the wide demand for it and his rapid production. Pressed by his popularity, he repeated the same types until he wrecked the freshness and allure of [174] his design ; he as inevitably became mannered to affectation, and ended in being wearisome. It is easy to understand a virile and dramatic artist of stupendous genius like Michelangelo speaking with contempt of Perugino as " that blockhead (goffo) in art," in the presence of the stream of work which poured out in his later years from his hand ; indeed, from the year 1500 his art rapidly deteriorated. But Perugino's best work is of very high achievement. It has been said that his art is rarely inspired ; and perhaps this is so-the effort to appear inspired is so dogged and insistent ; but he uttered most exquisitely and subtly a mystic and idealistic note that is the very soul of the Umbrian character, and is rarely wholly absent from his devotional paintings-and he uttered it as no other painter ever did. His art knows no struggles of the soul ; it is serene, contemplative, with a sense of dignity that is not without impressiveness, though it is tinged with the formal acceptance of the ideals of the devout. The presence of the Madonna rouses in him a sweet and tender regard; she appears ever as one held by a surprise of wonder that she, the wife of a well-to-do burgess of the city of Perugia, should have been chosen as the mother of God. Of dramatic sense he had none; and his figures thereby know little action-they are thrilled with no human passions, know no suffering, but rather give forth a fragrance that is sweetly devotional-they know the peace of a quiet and undisturbed mind. A certain and unquestioning creed, taught by the tradition of the big church in the town, holds them ; and serenity exhales like incense from the works of his skill. " Fervour, not faith," it has been said, " is the keynote of Perugino's art " ; but Perugino was almost incapable of so much artistic violence even as fervour-the fragrance of his art is [175] of a more subtle and elusive kind, which is perhaps best expressed by such a phrase as the sense of peacefulness aroused by an oft-repeated prayer or hymn of praise.

Michelangelo's was a hard saying, but it was the contempt of a world-force, of a very tornado, for a still lake. Perugino's instinct for airy composition gives largeness to his design, and greatly enhances the serenity of mood that was his eternal aim and delight ; and the beautiful, gem-like transparency of his colour further enhances his exquisite sense of reverie and sweet ecstasies. Perugino created for the soul a resting-place peopled with mild and saintly beings, where the pomps and vanities of the world are not thrust upon the attention, but only as an echo float in the air like an ethereal whisper. The worldly folk receive no shock of admonition-no hint of the day of wrath, nor, indeed, of the end of days.

It will be noticed that the colour-scheme of Perugino's paintings is nearly always dominated by blue-a limpid blue as of southern seas, pure and luminous as the tender blue of still waters, which he employs with strange allure to arouse a tense sense of serenity. And he ever sets his beautiful contemplative Madonnas and rapt saints against a serene mountain landscape, under a luminous peaceful blue of the high heavens that melt away into an horizon of cool pallor as of the glassy shallows of a pool, to meet the pale blue of the distant mountains in the leagues beyond at the edge of the hushed world.

The National Gallery in London possesses a superb example of his art at its highest achievement-the triptych (or triple picture) of The Virgin adoring the Infant Christ, with the wing panels of the Archangel Michael, and the Archangel Raphael and the young Tobias, which was once part of an altarpiece in the Certosa at Pavia, but, being replaced by [176] a copy there, this once votive offering against blindness was sold to the National Gallery by the Melzi family of Milan. At the Louvre is a very beautiful circular picture, or tondo, of the Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels.

Of Perugino's many pupils there was one that came to him in Perugia who was destined to immortal fame-a handsome youth of seventeen years, whom they called Raphael Sanzio, but whom all men now call Raphael. When the youth came to him in 1500, Perugino was at the very height of his career and reputation ; the master was soon to see his pupil preferred before him, rising by leaps to the giddiest heights of public acclaim-and Perugino suffering much travail of heart thereby.

Whilst at work on a fresco at Fontignano in the February of 1523, his fame wholly dimmed by his pupil's splendour, though that pupil was already dead some three years gone by, Perugino caught the plague and died. It is interesting to know that this fresco on which his hand was busy when death took him in his seventy-seventh year is now at the National Gallery in London.

There is something fantastic in the pietism of Perugino's art amidst a world rapidly falling into scepticism and social corruption ; yet there is a sense of formalism in that art which gives hint of the painting that is " lucrative."

Perugino's keen eye for the money-bags early taught him that eyes raised in ecstasy of sweet adoration, the upturned oval face, the head swung in humility of tenderness towards the shoulder, the exquisitely and daintily-robed figures, would win his art to the walls of the convent and the palace. But when he came to paint the Greek or Roman legend, or history of antique days, his pietistic sentimentality betrayed its limits-it fitted ill a Cato who held liberty above life. Like many of the pietistic, his [177] body held a sordid soul. His hard face does not belie him. Unfaithful, money-grubbing, dastardly in vengeance-he found the pietistic to pay, so he created pietisms. In the December of 1486 he hired a notorious assassin, Aulista di Angelo of Perugia, and, arming himself also, set out to waylay and beat an enemy near S. Pietro Maggiore at Florence. The tale of the Church refusing his body burial after death was as likely enough due to panic of the plague-of which he died-though the story goes that he refused to confess as he lay dying, vowing that he wished to know how an unrepentant soul would fare in the other world.

Marrying a beautiful girl, he loved to dress her out in fine array and costly jewellery with his own hands. He treated Art as a trade-sought and obtained a large amount of orders, which his two great workshops and many apprentices turned out wholesale, and he thereby came to considerable estate. He suffered bitter jealousy of Michelangelo and his young pupil Raphael ; indeed, there is something pathetic in the grey-haired old man retiring from Rome to make place for the gifted boy Raphael. But it seems to have made no difference to the demand for his works.