Tuscany and Umbria in the Renaissance

Piero della Francesca

Now if we return to Tuscany, we shall see that Florence, like another Paris, gathered talented individuals from the confines of its dependencies and left only here and there a genius whom we must pause to recognize during our journey. Lucca bought its charter of autonomy from Emperor Charles IV (1369) and remained a free city until the time of Napoleon. The people of Lucca rightly prided themselves on their eleventh-century cathedral; with repeated repairs, they kept it in good condition and turned it into a fine art museum. In this cathedral the eye and spirit can still enjoy several excellent works: the singers' stalls (1452) and its stained glass (1458); a tomb made by Jacopo della Quercia (1406); a panel of the Virgin with Saints Stephen and John the Baptist (1509), one of Bartolommeo's richest works; and several beautiful paintings from the works of Luca's son, Matteo Civitali.

Pistoia preferred Florentine rule to freedom. The strife of the “Whites” and “Blacks” so disrupted the city's order that its government asked the Florentine city council to take administration into its hands (1306). From then on Pistoia took its art, like its laws, from Florence. Giovanni della Robbia and several assistants made a relief inscription with glazed terracotta for the Ceppo hospital. These reliefs related to the “Seven Works of Mercy”: clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, visiting prisoners, welcoming strangers, burying the dead, and comforting the afflicted.

Pisa, which was once so wealthy that it could turn mountains of marble into a cathedral, baptistery, and leaning tower, owed its wealth to its strategic position at the mouth of the Arno River. For the same reason Florence brought it under subjection (1405). The people of Pisa never accepted this servitude and rose in revolt several times. In 1431 the Florentine city council expelled all men capable of bearing arms from Pisa and held their women and children as hostages to prevent any opposing movement. Pisa used the French invasion (1495) to declare its independence; it fought with mercenary soldiers for fourteen years; and finally, after a very courageous resistance, it fell. Many families, who preferred exile to slavery, migrated to France or Switzerland—among them the ancestors of the historian Sismondi, who in 1838 wrote a splendid account of these events in his History of the Italian Republics. Florence tried to compensate for its despotic rule with financial aid to the University of Pisa and by sending its artists to adorn the cathedral and Camposanto of that city; but even the famous frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in that sacred cemetery could not calm a city that was geologically condemned to decline. For the alluvial debris of the Arno River gradually advanced the coastline into the sea and created a new port at Leghorn (Livorno), ten kilometers away. As a result, Pisa lost its commercial position, which had both caused its prosperity and its misfortune.

San Gimignano took its name from Saint Geminianus: around the year 450, when this place was only a village, Saint Geminianus saved it from Attila's raids. This city enjoyed some prosperity in the fourteenth century, but its wealthy families engaged in dangerous factionalism and built fifty-six fortified towers that made it famous as San Gimignano delle Belle Torri [of the beautiful towers]. The number of those towers has now been reduced to thirteen. In 1353 this strife became so intense that the people of the city considered annexation to Florentine territory more advisable than its independence and submitted to it with good will. From then on life apparently left that city. Domenico Ghirlandaio built the chapel of Santa Fina, famous for its very beautiful frescoes; Benozzo Gozzoli painted scenes from the life of Saint Augustine in the church of Sant'Agostino that equaled the work of Domenico in the Medici chapel; and Benedetto da Maiano made very delightful altars for those sacred places. But trade fell into other channels, industry declined, and taste and innovation disappeared. San Gimignano lived in lethargy with its narrow streets and towers heading toward ruin; in 1928 Italy turned this city, which is a half-living image of medieval life, into a national monument.

Sixty-five kilometers from Florence lay Arezzo, which was a vital point in Florence's defense and trade network. The Florentine government was eager to dominate it; in 1384 Florence bought that city from the Duke of Anjou, and its inhabitants never forgot this disgrace. Arezzo nurtured Petrarch, Aretino, and Vasari in its bosom, but could not keep them, for its spirit still belonged to the Middle Ages. Luca Spinello, called Aretino, went from Arezzo to Pisa and painted exciting frescoes of the excitement of battle scenes in the Camposanto (1390–1392), but he also painted images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints with astonishing piety and purity. If we accept Vasari's account, we must say that Luca portrayed the devil so repulsively that he appeared to him in a dream and scolded him so severely that he died of fright—at the age of ninety-nine.

Borgo San Sepolcro, located northeast of Arezzo, in the upper part of the Tiber River, was so small that it could not present a high-ranking artist to the world. Piero di Benedetto was called della Francesca after his mother's name; for his mother was still pregnant with him when his father died; therefore his upbringing was entirely in his mother's care, who guided and helped him and with her own efforts raised his education in mathematics and art to high levels. Although he was born in Borgo San Sepolcro, the first mention of him is that in 1439 he was in Florence. This was the same year that Cosimo brought the Council of Ferrara to Florence; Piero apparently saw the magnificent robes of the Byzantine bishops and princes who had come to negotiate the union of the Greek and Roman churches. With greater certainty one can imagine that he observed Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel; this was ordinary for any art student in Florence. Piero blended the grandeur, power, and solidity of Masaccio's perspective with the dignified and majestic refinement of the sovereigns of the East.

After returning to the Borgo (1442), at the age of thirty-six Piero was elected to the city council. Three years later he received his first commission to paint a panel of the Virgin of Mercy for the church of San Francesco. This panel, still preserved in the Palazzo Comunale, includes these images: a crowd of sorrowful saints, the Virgin with eight singing angels on her robe, Gabriel with a serious face announcing the Virgin's motherhood, the crucified Christ in peasant dress and appearance, and spirited figures of the “Sorrowful Mother” and Saint John the Apostle. This painting is almost half-primitive, but it is powerful: there is no graceful feeling or delicate decoration in it; its sorrowful story has no ideal refinement or purity; rather its figures have bodies soiled and worn by the struggles of life, and yet in the silence of their suffering, and in their prayers and acts of forgiveness, they ascend to heaven with nobility.

His fame had now spread throughout Italy and his art was sought everywhere. In Ferrara (1449) he decorated the Ducal Palace with wall paintings. Rogier van der Weyden was then court painter; probably Piero learned something of the new painting technique with oil colors from him. In Rimini (1451) he painted a portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta, the tyrant and murderer and at the same time patron of art, while praying, with the presence of two dogs adding to the execution of his prayer. In Arezzo, between the years 1452 and 1464, Piero created a series of frescoes for the church of San Francesco that represent the peak of his art. These frescoes mostly express the story of the True Cross—with the event of its capture by Khosrow II, King of Iran, and its recovery and replacement in Jerusalem by Emperor Heraclius (Heraclius); at the same time, they include other events, such as: the death of Adam, the meeting of the Queen of Sheba with Solomon, and the victory of Constantine over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. The prominent elements of these frescoes are: the emaciated body of Adam at the point of death, the worn face and hanging breasts of Eve, the strong bodies of their sons, the almost masculine faces of their daughters, the magnificent procession of the Queen of Sheba, the profound face of Solomon, the sudden flash of light in Constantine's dream, the anxiety of the soldiers and horses in Heraclius's victory—these are among the interesting frescoes of the Renaissance period.

Perhaps during the intervals of this important effort, Piero decorated an altarpiece for the church of Perugia, and also painted several wall paintings in the Vatican. The latter images were later obliterated by whitewashing the walls to make room for Raphael's magical collection. In 1469, in Urbino, he created his most famous work. This was an interesting portrait of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. In a military festival, Federico's nose was broken and his right cheek was scratched. Piero showed the left cheek, which was undamaged but had many moles, and portrayed the broken nose with bold realism; his firm lips, half-closed eyes, and serious face show a man of affairs who is indifferent to worldly pleasures and has satisfied the lust for wealth and power; nevertheless, in these features, that delicate taste that led Federico to hold banquets at court and gather a famous library of classical and religious manuscripts is not evident. Together with this portrait, in another panel now in the Uffizi Gallery, a profile of Battista Sforza, Federico's wife, is seen: an almost Dutch face, pale, and even somewhat yellowish, against a background of fields, hills, clear sky, and the battlements of the palace. Piero, behind these two pictures, which open and close like a book, painted two panels of “Triumph” ceremonies—one of Federico on the chariot of victory, and the other of Battista with the majesty befitting a queen. Both of these pictures are in the utmost delicacy and beauty.

Piero, around 1480, at the age of sixty-four, suffered from an eye disease. According to Vasari he had gone blind, but apparently he could still paint well. In those years of old age and weakness he wrote a treatise on perspective and an article on the relations and geometric traditions of the parts of the picture. His pupil, Luca Pacioli, adopted his views, which he had written in a book entitled Divine Proportion; and perhaps in this way Piero's mathematical ideas influenced Leonardo's studies in the geometry of art.

The world forgot Piero's books but rediscovered his paintings. When we think of his time and consider that his work was completed just when Leonardo began his activity, he must be placed among the first-rank painters of fifteenth-century Italy. His pictures seem raw, the faces of his panels are rough and many of them seem to have a Flemish mold. What gives them gentleness and nobility is their calm dignity, royal heaviness, and restrained yet effective power. What compensates for their roughness and rawness is that his designs have harmonious coherence and, above all, Piero's hand, without the intervention of feeling and ideal imagination, is faithful in drawing what the eye has seen and the mind has imagined.

Piero was so far from the dense center of Renaissance artistic activity that he could not reach the probable perfection of its art, or fully benefit from the influence of his own art. Nevertheless, Signorelli was one of his pupils, and Luca took help from him in forming his own style. Raphael's father invited Piero to Urbino; although this invitation took place fourteen years before Raphael's birth, that promising young man apparently saw and studied Piero's paintings in Urbino and in Perugia. Melozzo da Forlì learned something of the power and grace of drawing from Piero; Melozzo's music-making angels in the Vatican recall the angels that Piero painted in one of his final works—the Nativity of Christ, now among the treasures of the National Gallery in London: just as Piero's singing angels recall the choir of Luca della Robbia. Thus, humans transmit their heritage to their descendants, and this transmission is half the technique of civilization.

Signorelli

When Piero della Francesca was creating his masterpieces in Arezzo, Luca Spinello's grandfather, the ancestor of the historian Vasari, invited the young Luca Signorelli to his house to study with Piero. Luca was born in Cortona, about twenty-three kilometers southeast of Arezzo. When Piero came to teach him, he was fourteen years old, and when he completed his training with Piero, he was twenty-four. During this interval Piero absorbed the master's art with overflowing love and learned to draw the naked body with precision and complete accuracy. In his own workshop and in hospitals, under the gallows and in cemeteries, he searched for the human body; he did not seek beauty from it, but power. Apparently he cared for nothing else; if sometimes he was forced to draw other images, he often added the role of a naked body to “adorn” it. He was not as skilled in painting naked women as Michelangelo; he drew them with weak success; and among men, unlike Leonardo and Sodoma, he did not choose those who were young and beautiful, but selected middle-aged men who had reached the peak of muscular development.

Signorelli, with such passion in his head, wandered through the cities of central Italy and left panels of nudes everywhere. After leaving several works in Arezzo and San Sepolcro, he went to Florence (around 1475). He painted the School of Pan, which was an image of naked gods, and dedicated it to Lorenzo. Perhaps he painted the Virgin and Child panel, now in the Uffizi Gallery, for Lorenzo. In this panel the Virgin is disproportionately large but beautiful, and the background of the picture consists mostly of naked men. Michelangelo took the idea for his Holy Family picture, which he painted for Doni, from this panel.

Nevertheless, this enthusiast of naked bodies could also be pious in his painting. His Virgin in the Holy Family panel is one of the most beautiful works of Renaissance art. At the order of Pope Sixtus IV, he went to Loreto (around 1479) and adorned the sanctuary of Santa Maria with beautiful frescoes of the writers of the Gospels and other saints. Three years later, he set out for Rome and in that city painted a scene from the life of Moses for the Sistine Chapel. In this panel the male figures are delightful and the female ones disproportionate. In 1484 he was called to Perugia and painted several unimportant frescoes in the cathedral there. From then on he apparently settled in Cortona and there painted pictures for sending to other places; sometimes he left that city—mostly to carry out important commissions in Siena, Orvieto, and Rome. In the cloister of the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena, he painted scenes from the life of Saint Benedict. Some of these frescoes are drawn with carelessness, but others are so enchanting that the prior of the monastery insisted, before paying Signorelli's wages, that, to preserve the peace of mind in the monastery, the naked bodies be covered.

When the banker Agostino Chigi returned to his birthplace in 1507, he liked Signorelli's work and invited him to Rome. Pope Julius II assigned this artist the task of painting one of the rooms of Nicholas V in the Vatican, but he delayed so much on the credit of his own name that the pope soon dismissed him. Raphael was hired in his place, Signorelli studied the style of that young master for moments and received part of the softness and grace of his work. Chigi hired Signorelli to paint the story of Alexander and Roxana in his villa and saved him from idleness. Shortly afterward Leo X, who succeeded Pope Julius, showed favor to Signorelli and recalled him again to the Vatican. Giovanni painted an image of Lucretia for this pope, in the act of suicide with a dagger; Leo gave him a good reward and bestowed upon him the title “Knight of the Order of Christ.”

After returning to Siena, with such honor, Signorelli received numerous commissions from clerics and others. Although he apparently was skeptical, he painted images of the Virgin that had almost as much beauty and delicacy as Raphael's works. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian was especially to his taste, and his painting of this subject in the Pitti Palace has never been surpassed. In the church of San Domenico in Siena, he painted Saint Catherine in ecstasy. This picture was so realistic that Baldassare Peruzzi considered it unique in its kind. While engaged in these religious subjects, Signorelli angered Siena with what Vasari calls “animal acts.” Vasari writes:

His way of life was reckless and dishonorable; and since he always gathered around himself flatterers and catamites who were unnaturally dear to him, he earned the name Sodoma for himself. Instead of being ashamed of this, he took pride in it, wrote poems about it, and sang them to the sound of the lute. He liked to keep all kinds of animals in his house: badgers, squirrels, monkeys, lynxes, donkeys, horses, jackdaws, pigeons, and other animals of this kind. ... In addition to these he had a black crow that he had taught to speak so well that the bird imitated his voice, especially in answering the doorbell, so that many people mistook its voice for its owner's. The other animals were so tame that they always gathered around him and occupied him with their strange leaps and bounds; his house resembled Noah's Ark.

He married a woman from a good family; but after that woman bore him a child, he left her. When he lost his honor and income in Siena, he went to Volterra, Pisa, and Lucca (1541–1542) and sought new patrons for himself. When these sources also came to an end, he returned to Siena, lived in poverty with his animals for seven years, and said farewell to life at the age of seventy-two. He was a skilled draftsman who learned anatomical study, body proportions, perspective, and foreshortening with astonishing precision and accuracy; his work in composing and decorating the human body is delightful. Sometimes in his images of the Virgin he reaches a degree of tenderness, and his singing angels in Loreto delight discerning minds. But in the rest of his works he can be considered the herald of anatomical art of the body; there is no softness of feeling, sensual grace, brilliance of color, or enchanting chiaroscuro in them; he less recognized that the duty of the body is to be the external manifestation and tool of the soul or delicate and intangible personality, and the masterpiece of art is to find and reveal that soul that lies under the veil of the body. Michelangelo learned from Signorelli this worship of anatomy, that is, losing the goal in the means, and in the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel, on a larger scale, repeated the physiological madness of the Orvieto frescoes; but on the ceiling of the same chapel, and also in his own statue, he used the body as the voice of the soul. In Signorelli's works, painting took one step from the horrors and tendernesses of medieval art to the complicated and lifeless exaggerations of the Baroque style.

Siena and Sodoma

In the fourteenth century, Siena kept pace with Florence in trade, government, and art. In the fifteenth century this city was brought to its knees by the chaos resulting from fanatical factional hostility such that its like has not been seen in any other European city. Five groups ruled the city in turn; each of them in turn fell with a revolt; and its influential members, sometimes numbering several thousand, were exiled. One can understand the bitterness of this strife from the oath that two of the factions swore to end it (1494). An eyewitness describes their gathering in separate aisles of the city's cathedral, in the middle of the night and in the light of a weak lamp:

The conditions of peace, which filled eight pages of paper, were read. The reading of these eight pages was accompanied by the most terrible oaths—oaths full of curses and excommunication, insults and threats and commitments to confiscate property, and several other torments whose hearing was very terrifying; even at the moment of death no sacred rite was to save the oath-breakers, but it was to be such that it would increase their torment; this oath document was such that I had never heard anything more terrifying. On the sides of the altar, the secretaries wrote the names of all those who swore on the cross. On each side of the cross stood one person and both together kissed the cross. While taking the oath, the bell rang and the Lord's Prayer was performed with religious singers, accompanied by the sound of the organ.

Amid these upheavals the powerful Petrucci family came to power. In 1497, Pandolfo Petrucci became dictator and called himself “the Magnificent.” He decided to grant Siena that order, peace, and gentlemanly despotism that had caused Florence's elevation in the time of the Medici dynasty. Pandolfo was very clever and always escaped every crisis unscathed; he even managed to escape Cesare Borgia's criticism. With a little discrimination, he supported art; but he resorted to secret murder so much that his death caused universal joy (1512). In 1525 this unfortunate city paid Emperor Charles V 15,000 ducats to place itself under his protection.

In the short and brilliant periods of peace, art in Siena made its last leap. Antonio Barili continued the medieval art of wood carving. Lorenzo di Mariano built a high altar with classical beauty in the Fontegiusta church. Jacopo della Quercia took his family name from a village near Siena. The costs of his first statues were provided by Orlando Malavolti. When Orlando was exiled for supporting a defeated political faction, Jacopo left Siena for Lucca (1390) and there built a magnificent tomb for Ilaria del Carretto. After an unsuccessful competition with Donatello and Brunelleschi in Florence, he went to Bologna and made statues and reliefs of marble on the sides and above the door of San Petronio that are among the best works of Renaissance sculpture (1425–1428). Michelangelo saw them seventy years later, praised the power of those naked figures, and for a time drew inspiration from them. After returning to Siena, Jacopo stayed there for ten years and spent most of this time working on his masterpiece, the Fonte Gaia (Joyful Fountain). At the base of this fountain he made a marble relief of the Virgin, who was considered the joy and protector of the city; Jacopo surrounded this figure with stone images of the “Seven Principal Virtues” and added scenes from Old Testament stories to complete them, and filled the spaces between them with figures of children and animals—power of execution and imaginative force employed in this work is a sign of Michelangelo's genius ahead of its time. The people of Siena, because of this work, called him “Jacopo of the Fountain” and paid him 2,200 crowns (55,000 dollars?) as wages. He said farewell to the world at the age of sixty-four, worn out by excessive effort in the path of art, and left the people of the city in mourning.

This proud city in most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries hired a hundred artists from various places to build its cathedral, which is now one of the shining jewels of Italian art. From 1413 to 1423 Domenico del Coro was one of the masters of colorful inlay work and supervisor of the artistic works of the cathedral; he, in collaboration with Matteo di Giovanni, Domenico Beccafumi, Pinturicchio, and many others, paved the floor of that great temple with marble and thereby created an image of biblical stories on its surface that made the floor of that cathedral more famous than the floors of all the churches in the world.

Antonio Federighi made two baptismal fonts for the cathedral, and Lorenzo and Chita made two astonishing canopies. Sano di Matteo built the Loggia della Mercanzia in the Campo (1417–1438), and Chita and Federighi adorned its columns with harmonious statues. In the fourteenth century several famous palaces were founded. Among these palaces one can name Salimbeni, Buonsignori, Saracini, and Grottanelli. And around 1470 Bernardo Rossellino prepared plans for the Piccolomini family palace in the Florentine style. Andrea Bregno made an altar for this family in the cathedral (1481); and Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini created a library in that cathedral (1495) to house the books and manuscripts he had inherited from his uncle Pope Pius II. Lorenzo di Mariano made the best doors for the library, which had no equal in Italy; and Pinturicchio and his companions (1503–1508) painted delightful frescoes on the walls, inside frames made with masonry materials, of scenes from the life of that learned pope.

In the fifteenth century Siena was rich in second-rank painters. Taddeo Bartoli, Domenico di Bartolo, Lorenzo di Pietro called Vecchietta, Stefano di Giovanni called Sassetta, Sano di Pietro, Matteo di Giovanni, and Francesco di Giorgio—all preserved the strong religious tradition of Sienese art, and painted ascetic subjects and sorrowful saints, as if they wanted to continue the Middle Ages forever. Sassetta, who has recently regained fame due to the passing whim of critics, with simple lines and colors, beautifully painted the Magi and their companions, who solemnly pass through mountainous passages to reach the cradle of Jesus; he showed the Nativity of the Virgin in one panel; he embodied Saint Francis's pact with Poverty in a delightful panel. This artist said farewell to life in 1450, “while suffering severe attacks of a very cold wind that blew from the southwest.”

Only in the late century did Siena produce an artist whose fame, for good and bad, echoed throughout Italy. His real name was Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, but his sharp-tongued contemporaries called him Sodoma, meaning “sodomite,” because he openly practiced sodomy. He accepted this nickname with pleasure, as if it were a title that many deserve but few succeed in obtaining. He was born in Vercelli in 1477, later went to Milan, and perhaps learned both painting and sodomy from Leonardo; the smile he placed on the Virgin's lips in the Virgin panel resembles the smile of Leonardo da Vinci's pictures. He imitated Leonardo's Leda so well that for centuries it was thought to be the master's own work. After Ludovico's fall, he went to Siena, invented a style of his own, and portrayed Christian subjects with a “pagan” love. Perhaps during his first stay in Siena he painted the image of Christ at the Column. Christ is bound to the column to be scourged, but no dejection is observed in his features. For the monks of Monte Oliveto Maggiore he made several frescoes that recounted the story of the life of Saint Benedict. Some of these frescoes are drawn with carelessness, but others are so enchanting that the prior of the monastery insisted, before paying Signorelli's wages, that, to preserve the peace of mind in the monastery, the naked bodies be covered.

Perugino

Perugia and the Baglioni Family

In the mountainous region of Umbria—which is bounded on the west by Tuscany, on the south by Latium, and on the north and east by the Marches—the cities of Terni, Spoleto, Assisi, Foligno, Perugia, and Gubbio are located. We begin the description of these cities with the account of Fabriano—which is on the other side of the border in the Marches—because Gentile da Fabriano was the pioneer of the Umbrian school.

Gentile is not so famous, but he is a prominent and distinctive artistic personality: he painted pictures in the medieval style in Gubbio, Perugia, and the Marches; he had a vague feeling of the influence of the first Sienese painters; and he gradually reached such a prominent position that, according to one unbelievable account, Pandolfo Malatesta paid him 14,000 ducats for frescoing the chapel of the Broletto in Brescia (around 1410). About ten years later, the Senate of Venice commissioned him to paint a battle scene in the Great Council Hall; apparently Gentile Bellini was among his pupils at that time. Later he went to Florence and painted an Adoration of the Magi in the church of Santissima Trinità (1423) that even the proud Florentines praised as a masterpiece. This picture is still preserved in the Uffizi Gallery. Its elements consist of: a beautiful constellation of kings and their procession, shapely horses, noble oxen, seated monkeys, agile dogs, a beautiful Mary; all of these are directed toward an attractive child who has placed a inquisitive hand on the bald head of a kneeling king. The picture has an exhilarating color and flowing lines, but it is devoid of the technique of perspective and foreshortening. Pope Martin V called Gentile to Rome, and he painted several frescoes in San Giovanni in Laterano. These frescoes have now faded, but their excellent quality can be understood from the praise of Rogier van der Weyden, who, upon seeing them, considered Gentile the greatest painter in Italy. Gentile painted other frescoes in the church of Santa Maria Nuova that have also now faded. Michelangelo, upon seeing them, told Vasari: “He had a hand like his name.”¹ Gentile said farewell to the world in Rome in 1427, at the height of his fame.

His artistic life testifies that Umbria, to which he belonged culturally, was in the process of producing geniuses in style and art. Nevertheless, on the whole the Umbrian painters took their models from their Sienese colleagues and continued the religious temperament completely—from Duccio to Perugino and the early years of Raphael's art. Assisi was the spiritual source of Umbrian art. The churches and legends of Saint Francis, through the neighboring states, spread a faith that dominated painting and architecture and drove out the pagan worldly subjects that had invaded Italian art from other places. Portraiture was less requested from Umbrian painters, but ordinary people, who sometimes spent the savings of a lifetime on this path, turned to a painter who was usually a local to make an image of the Virgin with the “Holy Family” for their chapel; few churches were so poor that they could not provide money for such works, which were a sign of hopeful faith and religious pride of the community. For this reason, Gubbio had a painter named Ottaviano Nelli, and Foligno had a painter named Niccolò di Liberatore, and Perugia prided itself on having three skilled painters named Bonfigli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio.

Perugia was the oldest, largest, richest, and most turbulent city in Umbria. This city is located at an altitude of 490 meters, on an almost inaccessible peak, and has a wide view of the surrounding lands; its position was so favorable for defense that the Etruscans, before the existence of Rome, built a city on it—or conquered it. Perugia, which for a long time was claimed by the popes, declared its independence in 1375 and for more than a century suffered such intense factionalism that its like existed only in Siena. Two wealthy families fought with each other to take control of the government, trade, endowments, and its population of forty thousand. The Oddi and Baglioni families secretly or openly killed each other in the streets; their struggles irrigated with blood the plain that smiled below the towers of the city. The members of the Baglioni family were famous for the beauty of their faces, physique, bravery, and ferocity. Among the pious people of Umbria, they despised the church and took pagan names—such as Ercole, Troilo, Ascanio, Annibale, Atalanta, Penelope, Lavinia, and Zenobia. In 1445 the Baglioni frustrated the Oddi's attempt to seize the city; from then on, they ruled the city like tyrants, although they apparently accepted papal subjection. Now hear the story of Baglioni rule from the words of Francesco Matarazzo, Perugia's own historian:

From the day of the exile of the Oddi family, the condition of our city became worse and worse. All the young men took up the profession of soldiery; their lives became disturbed; every day severe and extreme operations took place, and the city had lost order and justice. Everyone acted as judge for himself, at his own discretion and with royal power. The pope sent many representatives to the city to establish calm in it. But whoever came, returned out of fear of being mutilated, for the Baglioni had threatened some that they would throw them out of the palace window, so that no cardinal or other representative dared to approach Perugia, unless he was a friend of the Baglioni. The city had fallen into such misfortune that the most arrogant men were the most esteemed; and those who had killed two or three people walked freely and at will in the palace; they went with sword and dagger to the chief judge or other officers of the law, and spoke with them. Every worthy man was trampled by the rabble who were favored by the nobles, and no one was master of his own property. The nobles constantly usurped the property and lands of the people. All offices were sold or, if there was no buyer, abolished; and taxes and tributes were so excessive that the people were in uproar. One day one of the cardinals asked Pope Alexander VI: “What should be done with these devils who do not fear holy water?”

After the expulsion of the Oddi family, the Baglioni divided into new factions and engaged in the bloodiest struggles of the Renaissance period. Atalanta Baglioni, who had become a widow due to the murder of her husband, consoled herself with the beauty of her son Grifonetto. Matarazzo calls this son another Ganymede. After that son's marriage to Zenobia Sforza, whose beauty equaled his own, his mother's happiness apparently returned completely. But a smaller branch of the Baglioni family conspired to overthrow the ruling branch of the family—Astore, Guido, Simonetto, and Gian Paolo. Taking advantage of Grifonetto's bravery, the conspirators drew him into their group by fabricating a story that Gian Paolo had seduced his young wife. One night in 1500, when the Baglioni families had left their palaces and gathered in Perugia to attend the wedding of Astore and Lavinia, the conspirators attacked their beds and killed everyone except one. Gian Paolo, by going to the roofs and hiding until dawn with some terrified students, saved himself and in the morning, dressed in student clothing, left through the city gate. Atalanta, who was aware and terrified of her son's participation in these killings, drove him away from herself with curses and insults; the killers scattered and left Grifonetto alone and wandering in the city. The next day Gian Paolo returned to Perugia with an armed escort and encountered Grifonetto in a public square. Gian Paolo wanted to leave Grifonetto unharmed, but his soldiers suddenly wounded that young man mortally in his presence. Atalanta and Zenobia, when they came out of their hiding place, saw their son and husband dying. Atalanta knelt beside his body, took back her curse, blessed him, and asked him for forgiveness for his killers. Matarazzo says: “Then that noble young man extended his right hand to his young mother, pressed her white hand, and in a moment emptied the beautiful mold of his being of its soul.” At that time Perugino and Raphael were painting in Perugia.

Gian Paolo killed a hundred people in the streets or in the city's cathedral, on the suspicion that they had participated in the conspiracy, and ordered that the Palazzo Comunale be adorned with the heads of the killed and the inverted images of those hanged. This work provided an important commission for Perugia's art. Gian Paolo from then on, until he surrendered to Julius II (1506), ruled without rival. In that year he agreed to rule the city as the pope's vicar, but he knew no way to govern other than self-murder. In 1520, Leo X, who had grown tired of his crimes, deceived him with a safe-conduct letter, called him to Rome, and ordered that his head be cut off in Castel Sant'Angelo; this was one of the forms of Renaissance diplomacy. The other members of the Baglioni family maintained themselves in power for a while, but after Malatesta Baglioni killed one of Pope Paul III's envoys, the pope sent forces to conquer the city and annex it to the church (1534).

Perugino

In the era of this “cloak and dagger” rule, literature and art progressed in a wonderfully astonishing way; the same emotional temperament that praised the Virgin, despised cardinals, and killed close relatives, could feel the creative fever of writing, or steel itself in the furnace of the art of poetry. The chronicle of the city of Perugia, written by Matarazzo, which describes the peak of the Baglioni family's power, is one of the most spirited works of the Renaissance period. Before the rise of the Baglioni dynasty, trade had gathered enough wealth to build the Palazzo Comunale in the Gothic style (1280–1333), and to decorate it and the adjacent trade room with the best artistic works of Italy (1452–1456). The trade room had a judicial bench and an exchange table that represented the refined taste of Perugia's merchants. The church of San Domenico had an almost equally beautiful place for the choir group, and a famous chapel whose design was prepared by Agostino di Duccio. Agostino was undecided between sculpture and architecture; he usually combined both, as he had done in the chapel of San Bernardino (1461). In this chapel he had adorned almost the entire exterior with statues, reliefs, arabesque figures, and other decorations.

At least fifteen painters were engaged in such works in Perugia. Their leader, during Perugino's youth, was Benedetto Bonfigli. Apparently Benedetto, through acquaintance with Domenico Veneziano and Piero della Francesca, or through study and examination of the frescoes painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in Montefalco, learned part of the new methods that had been created in Florence by Masolino, Masaccio, Uccello, and others. By painting frescoes for the Palazzo Comunale he proved that he had complete knowledge of perspective, which was new among Umbrian painters; although the figures he had drawn were so uniform that they seemed borrowed from certain pictures, and their clothes were also slavishly drooping and shapeless. The younger rival of this painter was Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, who equaled him in the dullness of color application, but surpassed him in tenderness of feeling and occasional delicacy. Both Bonfigli and Fiorenzo trained two masters in the traditional art of Perugia who raised Umbrian painting to its utmost height.

Bernardino Betti, nicknamed Pinturicchio, learned the arts of glazed coloring and fresco painting from Fiorenzo, but he never learned the oil painting technique that had reached Perugino from the Florentines. In 1481, at the age of twenty-seven, he went to Rome with Perugino and adorned the framing in the Sistine Chapel with a lifeless image of the Baptism of Christ. But he gradually progressed and when Pope Innocent VIII ordered him to adorn one of the open halls of the Belvedere Palace, he resorted to a new method, and that was painting views of Genoa, Milan, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Rome. His painting was incomplete, but there was a brightness in his images that attracted Alexander VI. This passionate Borgia, who wanted to adorn his rooms in the Vatican, commissioned Pinturicchio and several of his assistants to adorn the walls and ceilings with frescoes of images of prophets, sibyls, musicians, scholars, saints, the Virgin, and perhaps one of his mistresses as well. These frescoes also pleased the pope so much that when part of Castel Sant'Angelo was designated for his personal use, he called Pinturicchio to paint scenes of the pope's struggle with Charles VIII (1495). At that time Pinturicchio's fame reached Perugia and he was called to that city; the authorities of the church of Santa Maria dei Fossi asked him to make a panel for the altar. Pinturicchio fulfilled this request by painting an image of the Virgin, Child, and John the Baptist, and his work pleased everyone except the experts. In Siena, as we saw, he adorned the Piccolomini Library with a spirited image of the life and legend of Pius II. This image, despite its many defects, has turned that library into one of the delightful remnants of Renaissance art. After spending five years on this work, he went to Rome and felt ashamed in the face of Raphael's success. From then on his luster faded from the field of art—perhaps due to the obvious superiority of Perugino and Raphael, and perhaps also due to illness. According to a dubious account, he died of hunger in Siena at the age of fifty-nine (1513).

Pietro Perugino earned this name because he chose Perugia for permanent residence, but the people of Perugia called him by his family name, Vannucci. He was born in Città della Pieve in 1446, was sent to Perugia at the age of nine and became the apprentice of an unknown painter. According to Vasari's account, his master considered the Florentine painters the best in Italy and advised him to go there to study art. Following his master's advice, Pietro went to Florence and carefully imitated Masaccio's frescoes and accepted apprenticeship or assistance from Verrocchio. Leonardo entered Verrocchio's workshop around 1468; it is very likely that Perugino met him and, although he was six years older than him, was not ashamed to learn from him some of the characteristics of perfection and delicacy, and the better method of perspective and oil painting. These skills are seen in Perugino's image of Saint Sebastian (Louvre), together with a beautiful architectural background and a landscape as calm as the face of that arrow-pierced saint. After leaving Verrocchio, Perugino returned to the Umbrian style of “Virgins” that were dignified and delicate; and through him it is possible that the hard and realistic style of Florentine painting became softer and led to the passionate idealism of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto.

Perugino, until 1481 (when he was thirty-five years old), had gained so much fame that he was invited to Rome by Sixtus IV. He painted several frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful remaining part of which is the Giving of the Keys from Jesus to Peter. This picture, in terms of the proportion of its parts, is excessively formal and conventional; but for the first time in painting, air appears in the picture as a distinct and almost tangible element with its mysterious degrees of light; and the clothes, which are uniform in Bonfigli's work, here are spiritedly pleated and folded; and several faces—Jesus, Peter, Signorelli—are astonishingly representative of their owners' nature; the same is true of the large, round, sensual, and realistic face of Perugino himself, who is portrayed as one of Jesus' apostles in that fresco.

In 1486 Perugino was again in Florence, for the city's judicial archive has recorded his arrest for wounding. He and one of his friends, disguised and with clubs, had ambushed a common enemy on one of the dark December nights; but before they could wound him, they were seen. Perugino's friend was exiled, and he himself was fined ten florins. After another period of activity in Rome, he set up a workshop in Florence (1492). He hired assistants, and began making pictures for sale to distant and near customers. These pictures were not always eloquent and complete. He painted a Pietà (the Virgin's mourning at her son's death) for the Servite brothers and with his assistants repeated the sorrowful Virgin and Magdalene of it a hundred times in various forms, for institutions and individuals. One of his Virgin and Saints pictures reached Vienna, another to Cremona, three others to Fano, and a picture of the Virgin in Glory to Perugia, another to the Vatican, a third to the Uffizi. His rivals accused him of turning his workshop into a factory, since they considered his becoming so wealthy and fat ugly. He sneered at these reproaches and raised his prices. When the city of Venice invited him to paint two panels in the Doge's Palace, and set 400 ducats (5,000 dollars?) as wages for him, he asked for 800 ducats; and when his proposal was rejected, he stayed in Florence. He was strictly bound to cash transactions and did not work on credit. He absolutely did not pretend to despise wealth; he was determined to accumulate wealth so that when his hand began to tremble and he could not paint well, he would not go hungry; he bought land in Florence and Perugia and after each delivery of commissioned panels he at least had one foot in his properties. His self-portrait in the Cambio of Perugia (1500) is in fact the true manifestation of his face. A short and fat face, a large nose, disheveled hair protruding from under a tight red hat, calm but penetrating eyes, rather contemptuous lips, and his thick neck and strong build, all confirm that he was not deceived; he was a prominent and self-confident man who considered humanity small. Vasari says: “He was not a religious man and never believed in the immortality of the soul.”

His skepticism and profit-seeking did not prevent him from occasional generosity, nor did it prevent him from creating some of the most delicate images of Umbrian faith in the Renaissance period. He painted a delightful single portrait of the Virgin for the Certosa di Pavia (this picture is now in London) and the Magdalene panel in the Louvre, which is attributed to him, shows such a charming sinner that one does not think that special divine grace is needed for her forgiveness. For the nuns of the convent of Santa Chiara in Florence he painted a Deposition from the Cross panel in which the dead women sleep with unparalleled beauty, the faces of the old men summarize their lives, and the lines of the composition intersect with the bloodless body of Christ; a landscape of slender trees on rocky slopes, and a distant city beside a silent bay, give a calm state to the scene of death and sorrow. Perugino painted as well as he sold.

His success in Florence finally convinced the people of Perugia of his worthiness. When the merchants of the Cambio wanted to adorn their trade room, they emptied their pockets with unprecedented generosity, and proposed the painting work to Pietro Vannucci. Following the custom of the time and the orders of a local scholar, they asked that painter to adorn the lecture hall with a mixture of Christian and pagan subjects: on the ceiling, the seven planets of the solar system and the zodiac; on one wall, the image of the Nativity of Christ and the Transfiguration; on the other wall, the Eternal Father, the Prophets, six pagan sibyls like the one Michelangelo later painted; on another wall, the four classical virtues, each presented by pagan heroes—Prudence by Numa, Socrates, and Fabius; Justice by Pittacus, Furius, and Trajan; Fortitude by Lucius, Leonidas, and Horatius Cocles, and Temperance by Pericles, Cincinnatus, and Scipio. All of these were apparently painted by Perugino and his assistants, including Raphael, in one year (1500)—the same year that the Baglioni family's struggles had made Perugia's streets bloody. When the blood was washed from the streets, the people of the city were able to gather to see the new beauty of the Cambio. Perhaps they found those pagan worthies somewhat lifeless; they wished that Perugino had shown them in motion and made them somewhat spirited. But David had royal grandeur, the Erythrean Sibyl was almost as pleasant and delicate as Raphael's Virgin, and the Eternal Father had come from an imaginative power that was good for an unbeliever. With his work on those walls, at the age of sixty-one, Perugino reached the peak of his power. In 1501 that grateful city elected him to the city council.

But he soon began the path of decline. In 1502 he painted the Marriage of the Virgin, which Raphael imitated two years later in his own Marriage of the Virgin. In 1503 he returned to Florence and was not pleased that there was so much uproar over Michelangelo's David statue; he was among the artists who had been chosen to study the best place to install that statue, and his opinion was overshadowed by the sculptor's own opinion. Shortly afterward, when the two saw each other, they insulted each other; Michelangelo, who was then a twenty-nine-year-old youth, called Perugino a fool and said that his art had become “old and worthless.” Perugino sued him for insult, but, except for ridicule, it had no result. In 1505 he agreed to complete the Descent from the Cross picture for the Annunziata, which the late Filippino Lippi had begun, and to add the Ascension of the Virgin to that picture as well. He completed Filippino's work with skill and speed; but in the Ascension picture many faces from his other panels were repeated, in such a way that the Florentine painters (who still envied him for his high wages) condemned him for improper laziness. He left the city with anger and settled in Perugia.

When he accepted Julius II's invitation to decorate a room in the Vatican (1507), the defeat of the age had been repeated by the young generation. When little progress was made in his work, his old pupil Raphael came to the field and drew a line through all his efforts. Perugino left Rome with a sad heart, returned to Perugia, and worked there until the end of his life. In 1514 he painted an altarpiece for the church of Sant'Agostino that displayed the story of the life of Christ. This panel was apparently completed in 1520. For the church of Madonna delle Lagrime in Trevi he painted the Adoration of the Magi (1521) that, despite weakness of drawing in some parts of it, is astonishing for a seventy-five-year-old man. In 1523, while painting in a neighboring town called Fontignano, he fell victim to the plague, or perhaps died due to old age and exhaustion. According to a dubious account, he refused to accept the prayer of absolution and said he preferred to see how they would deal with a rebellious unbelieving soul in that world. He was buried in the cemetery of unbelievers.

Everyone is aware of the defects of Perugino's painting—exaggeration in feeling, contrived and mournful piety, uniform oval faces, ribboned hair, bowed heads as a sign of humility, even the gloomy faces of Cato and the brave Leonidas. There have been dozens of painters like Perugino in Europe and America. He was a prolific master, but he had no sense of innovation. His pictures are devoid of action and spirit and present more the feeling of the faith of the people of Umbria than the realities and meaning of life. Nevertheless, there are many factors in them that can cause the joy of a spirit whose maturity has overcome its worldly experience. These factors are: the living quality of light, the simple beauty of women, the dignity of old men with abundant beards, the delicacy and calm of colors, and delightful landscapes that cover sorrow with peace.

When Perugino returned to Perugia in 1499, after long stays in Florence, he brought the technical skill of the Florentines to the land of Umbria without their critical power. He had entrusted these skills with complete fidelity until the moment of his death to his companions and pupils—including Pinturicchio, Francesco Ubertini (il Bacchiacca), Giovanni di Pietro (Lo Spagna), and Raphael. That master had achieved his purpose from life: he had enriched himself in his art and bequeathed his heritage to his descendants, and had raised a pupil who surpassed himself. Raphael was the flawless and perfected Perugino.