PINTURICCHIO
1454 - 1513

From the studio of this same Fiorenzo di Lorenzo's came also another pupil who was to know a wide fame. BERNARDINO DI BETTO, to become celebrated as PINTURICCHIO or PINTORICHIO, the " little painter," was born in Perugia in 1454, and was therefore eight years younger than Perugino. Being sent as pupil to Fiorenzo, he rapidly came to the front, and seems to have passed into Perugino's workshop in Perugia as his manager or foreman. By twenty-six he was engaged, together with Perugino, for about three years [178] in decorating the Sistine Chapel at Rome, painting therein his frescoes of the Journey of Mosesand the Baptism of Christ, in which Baptism of Christ he shows the marked influence of Perugino, as seen in Perugino's Baptism of Christ at the Rouen Museum. Pinturicchio was afflicted with deafness.

At Rome, Pinturicchio won to great favour, and was engaged upon and painted a large number of important works, of which were the famous frescoes in the Bufalini Chapel of the Church of Ara Cæli, the frescoes in the Colonna Palace, and the frescoes in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. About 1491 he started upon the decoration of the Borgia Rooms in the Vatican for the Borgian Pope Alexander VI. Pinturicchio was back in Perugia again by 1500, when the youth Raphael, at seventeen, entered Perugino's workshop there, and his art greatly influenced the eager and sensitive young fellow.

It was in 1502, Pinturicchio's forty-eighth year, when at the height of his maturity and powers and in the full utterance of his exquisite colour faculty, that he began his superb series of frescoes for Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini in the Library of the Cathedral at Siena of the Life of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who had reigned as Pope Pius II., on which Pinturicchio was employed for five years, until 1507.

Shortly after completing these great frescoes, Pinturicchio painted the famous and far-famed Return of Ulysses to Penelope, now at the National Gallery in London, wrought in fresco, as a wall decoration for the Palace of Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, but removed with astounding skill on to canvas in 1844, and bought some thirty years later by the National Gallery.

[179]Pinturicchio brought to the art of Umbria a rich faculty for colour. His naïve design has something fantastically and charmingly primitive in it. It were as though he harked back to a style before the achievement of his master Perugino, compared with whom he is in some ways almost as a primitive. He fills his space with detail from end to end of it, yet he does it with something akin to the consummate skill of the East, so that his work is rarely congested or overloaded. One stands before it marvelling that it escapes confusion. By some subtle skill of design he arrives at an effect as of massing, or that takes the place of masses, who had no capacity whatever for massing. It is true that his anatomy and feeling for form are vague and uncertain, but he has a sense of action and a glowing and rich habit of colour in which he steeps his elaborate design with true painter's skill that is much more Venetian than Tuscan. There is a delightful piquancy in the almost childlike and uncalculated scheme of that design ; but his unerring instinct wrought consummate design in all he did, scarce knowing what he did, as a bird's instinct makes a bird's song, regardless of the laws of counterpoint. It is wholly vain to measure that design with the rule and plummet of pedantic laws, and complain that he overcrowds it-he never afflicts one's senses with the discomforting impression of overcrowding ; and until that sense of ill-ease is created there is no overcrowding. A space may be overcrowded with a single figure. Pinturicchio had an instinct for design and for colour all his own ; he had as unerring an instinct for landscape, which he painted with exquisite vision. He could never resist birds, and you shall ever find him bringing one into his scheme wheresoever he can perch one ; the freedom and airiness of the life of singing birds were in fact closely akin to the airy fancies of the [180] man's soul-indeed, the flight of his quick and blithe invention was as the flight of singing birds. He was a very poet of colour, which he wrought with intense lyrical qualities into an exquisite art.

It has been complained of Pinturicchio that he lacked the religious emotions and poetic feelings of Perugino. In the religious sense he is certainly not gifted, if the devotional sense of the Church be religion ; but he had a lyrical sense which Perugino never approached, and he employed the chief significance of a painter, the music that is in colour, with a skill of hand which is astounding.

Bookish men have also blamed Pinturicchio in that the colours of his frescoes are too rich ! and the illusion of plastic life too complete for the requirements of wall decoration !-that, instead of accentuating the flatness of the wall-surface, he aimed at making his paintings like glimpses of life seen through an open window ! This is an age of strange accusations. All painting is upon flat surfaces ; and why the flat surface of a wall should not give forth the illusion of depth, any more than a flat picture upon the wall, is quaint hair-splitting. To thrust aside as bad art all the wall paintings and huge canvases employed for wall paintings that contain the illusion of depth and do not accentuate the flatness of the wall, would mean the rejection of some of the world's mightiest masterpieces. Such laws are the veriest fribble. The artist is not concerned with announcing the flatness of a wall, otherwise the wall were better unpainted. It is the artist's province to create the illusion of life. And whether he state that illusion upon a wall in terms of flatness, or whether he create the illusion of the roundness of form here called the plastic life, is a matter of utter indifference. The painter's realm is to employ colour, and to accuse him of employing colour too [181] well or too richly is as though one said that Shakespeare made Hamlet too like Hamlet.

Pinturicchio has another claim to fame : he created the type of Madonna that became the ideal of Raphael, and is so distinctive of Umbria.

Strangely enough, though Pinturicchio wrought his art in several towns throughout Umbria and Tuscany, and ranged as far as Rome, yet he never seems to have set foot in Florence.

He brought his wanderings to a close towards the end of his life by settling in Siena, the scene of his greatest triumphs ; and in Siena he laid him down and died, a starving and neglected man, broken in spirit by the brutal negligence of his infamous wife, Grania di Niccolo, whose intrigue with a soldier of the Sienese guard was an affair of public notoriety and shame.

One of Pinturicchio's ablest pupils was MATTEO BALDUCCI.