Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/714

682 P E R P E R his face that he was "a bungler in art" (goffo nell arte). This was not to be borne, and Vannucci brought, with equal indiscretion and ill success, an action for defamation of character. Put on his mettle by this mortifying trans action, he determined to show what he could do, and he produced the chef-d oeuvre of the Madonna and Saints for the Certosa of Pa via. The constituent parts of this noble work have now been sundered. The only portion which remains in the Certosa is a figure of God the Father with cherubim. An Annunciation has disappeared from cog nizance ; three compartments the Virgin adoring the infant Christ, St Michael, and St Raphael with Tobias are among the choicer treasures of the London National Gallery. The current story that Raphael bore a hand in the work is not likely to be true. This was succeeded in 1505 by an Assumption, in the Cappella dei Rabatta, in the church of the Servi in Florence. The painting may have been executed chiefly by a pupil, and was at any rate a failure : it was much decried ; Perugino lost his scholars; and towards 1506 he once more and finally abandoned Florence, going to Perugia, and thence in a year or two to Rome. Pope Julius II. had summoned Perugino to paint the Stanza in the Vatican, now called that of the Incendio del Borgo; but he soon preferred a younger competitor, that very Raphael who had been trained by the aged master of Perugia ; and Vannucci, after painting the ceiling with figures of God the Father in. different glories, in five medallion-subjects, found his occupation gone ; he retired from Rome, and was once more in Perugia from 1512. Among his latest works one of the best is the extensive altar-piece (painted between 1512 and 1517) of S. Agostino in Perugia; the component parts of it are now dispersed in various galleries. Perugino s last frescos Avere painted for the monastery of S. Agnese in Perugia, and in 1522 for the church of Castello di Fontignano hard by. Both series have dis appeared from their places, the second being now in the South Kensington Museum. He was still at Fontignano in 1524 when the plague broke out, and he died. He was buried in unconsecrated ground in a field, the precise spot now unknown. The reason for so obscure and unwonted a mode of burial has been discussed, and religious scepti cism on the painter s own part has been assigned as the cause ; the fact, however, appears to be that, on the sudden and widespread outbreak of the plague, the panic-struck local authorities ordained that all victims of the disorder should be at once interred without any waiting for religious rites. This leads us to speak of Perugino s opinions on religion. Vasari is our chief, but not our sole, authority for saying that Vannucci had very little religion, and was an open and obdurate disbeliever in the immortality of the soul. Gasparo Celio, a painter of the 16th century, cites Niccolo delle Pomarance (whose wife was related to Perugino s wife) as averring that the aged master on his deathbed rejected the last sacraments, and refused to confess, saying he was curious to know the final fate of an unconfessed soul, and therefore he was buried in uncon secrated ground. For a reader of the present day it is easier than it was for Vasari to suppose that Perugino may have been a materialist, and yet just as good and laudable a man as his orthodox Catholic neighbours or brother-artists; still there is a sort of shocking discrepancy between the quality of his art, in which all is throughout Christian, Catholic, devotional, and even pietistic, and the character of an anti-Christian contemner of the doctrine of immortality. It is difficult to reconcile this discrepancy, and certainly not a little difficult also to suppose that Vasari was totally mistaken in his assertion ; he was born twelve years before Perugino s death, and must have talked with scores of people to whom the Umbrian painter had been well known. "We have to remark that Perugino in 1494 painted his own portrait, now in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, and into this he introduced a scroll lettered "Timete Deum." That an open disbeliever should inscribe himself with " Timete Deum " seems odd ; one s first im pression is either that he cannot have been a disbeliever or else that he must have been a hypocrite as well, which, however, is still inconsistent with Vasari s account of the facts. It is possible, after all, that a man might fear God and yet have no confidence in immortality, or in many of the things which seemed in 1494 to be essentials of religion. The portrait in question shows a plump face, with small dark eyes, a short but well-cut nose, and sensuous lips ; the neck is thick, the hair bushy and frizzled, and the general air imposing. The later portrait in the Cambio of Perugia shows the same face with traces of added years. Perugino died possessed of coniderable property, leaving three sons. The character of Perugino s art is, as we have just said, through out religious, although, in some instances already indicated, he strayed outside the circle of Christian history and tradition. His art is reserved, self-contained, not demonstrative, yet conspicuously marked by a tendency to posing and balance, and to little artifices wherein the graceful merges in the affected. He had a particular mastery over abstracted purism of expression ; this appears con stantly in his works, and, while it carries the finer of them to a genuinely ideal elevation, it leaves upon many a mincing and mawkish taint which it is not easy to view without some impatience. Perugino did not recruit his strength from study of the antique ; his drawing, though frequently solid and able, is unequal, and there is a certain littleness of style in his forms, especially (with rare exceptions) the nude. His technical attainment was excep tional, and in colour he may be regarded as standing first in his generation in central Italy if we except Francia. Perugino does not leave upon us the impression of personal greatness ; he does not seem to have had struggling within him a profounder message to convey than he succeeded in conveying. There is neither massiveness of thought, nor novel initiative, nor glowing intensity, though there is some fervour of inspiration. Still, within his own province, he is a rare and excellent master. Among the very numerous works of Perugino a few not already named require mention. Towards 1501 he produced the picture; of the marriage of Joseph and the Virgin Mary (the "Sposalizio") now in the museum of Caen ; this served indisputably as the original, to a great extent, of the still more famous Sposalizio which was painted by Raphael in 1504, and which forms a leading attraction of the Brera Gallery in Milan. A vastly finer work of Perugino s than his Sposalizio is the Ascension of Christ, which, painted a little earlier for S. Pietro of Perugia, has for years past been in the museum of Lyons ; the other portions of the same altar-piece are dispersed in other galleries. In the chapel of the Disciplinati of Citta della Pieve is an Adoration of the Magi, a square of 21 feet containing about thirty life-sized figures ; this was executed, with scarcely credible celerity, from the 1st to the 25th March (or thereabouts) in 1505, and must no doubt be in great part the work of Vannucci s pupils. In 1507, when the master s work had for years been in a course of decline and his performances were generally weak, he produced, nevertheless, one of his best pictures the Virgin between St Jerome and St Francis, now in the Palazzo Penna. In S. Onofrio of Florence is a much- lauded and much-debated fresco of the Last Supper, a careful and blandly correct but not inspired work ; it has been ascribed to Perugino by some connoisseurs, by others to Raphael ; it may more probably be by some different pupil of the Umbrian master. Our account of Perugino follows in its main lines that given by Crowe and Cavalca.selle in their History of Painting in Italy, vol. iii. Vasari is, as usual, by far the most graphic narrator, but lax in his facts (though not so much so as in several other instances). Other leading authorities are Orsini, Vita, c., di Pietro Perugino e degli Scolari, 1804, and Mezzanotte, Vita, <c., di 1 ietro Vannucci, 183G. (W. M. R.) PERUVIAN BARK. See CINCHONA and QUININE. PERUZZI, BALDASSARE (1481-1536), architect and painter of the Roman school, was born at Ancajano, in the diocese of Volterra, and passed his early life at Siena, where his father resided. While quite young Peruzzi went to Rome, and there studied architecture and painting ; in the latter he was at first a follower of Perugino. The choir-frescos in San Onofrio on the Janiculan Hill, usually attributed to Pinturicchio, are by his hand. One of the first works which brought renown to the young architect was the villa on the banks of the Tiber in Rome now