Perugino

This is the centre panel from the great altar-piece commissioned by Duke Lodovico of Milan, from Perugino, for the Certosa of Pavia, and completed in 1499.

The three lower panels are replaced in the church by copies, the originals having been purchased from the Certosa by the Melzi family in 1786, and sold by Duke Melzi to the National Gallery in 1856. A masterpiece of Pietro's religious art, painted in his best method and best period.]

Perugino

BY SELWYN BRINTON, M.A.

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT

REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

[Illustration: IN SEMPITERNUM]

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK

NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate

I. Virgin and Child with Adoring Angels Frontispiece

In the National Gallery, London Page

II. St. Sebastian 14

In the Musée du Louvre, Paris

III. The Deposition from the Cross 24

In the Pitti Palace, Florence

IV. St. Mary Magdalen 34

In the Pitti Palace, Florence

V. Virgin with Little St. John adoring the Infant Christ 40

In the Pitti Palace, Florence

VI. Francesco delle Opere 50

In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

VII. The Dead Christ 60

In the Academy of Fine Arts, Florence

VIII. Virgin and Child with Two Male Saints 70

In the National Gallery, London

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I

[Illustration]

In considering the work of one of the greatest of the masters of the Renaissance, we have to go further back than the disputed question as to who was the first teacher of Pietro di Cristofano Vannucci--surnamed by his contemporaries "il Perugino," the Perugian--and to inquire into the more interesting story of his predecessors in that wonderful School of Umbria, on which his art puts, in a certain sense, the seal and completion.

In an earlier work on this subject I traced this school, in its first definite inception, to that grand old religious painter Niccolo da Foligno, whose art may be studied within his native city of Foligno--in his great altar-piece of the church of S. Niccolo--in Perugia, Paris, London, and his fine paintings in the Vatican Gallery at Rome; and in all these works I traced in Niccolo a great master, "archaic but strong in drawing and full of character, possessing just the qualities of the founder of a great school." But upon that school many influences were to stream in, and to affect its progress. The earlier art of Siena, the city of Mary Virgin, intensely emotional and religious in its character, the dignity of Duccio and the Lorenzetti, the grace and delicate beauty of Simone Memmi were among these. Close to Niccolo himself, in the hill-town of Montefalco, the Florentine, Benozzo Gozzoli, pupil of Fra Angelico, had been busied on picture stories from St. Francis' legend, which seem to find their continuation in the Perugian miracle pictures of Fiorenzo di Lorenzo; and yet nearer to Florence, in the Umbrian Borderland, that "King of Painting," Piero della Francesca, was to combine the Umbrian emotion with Florentine intellectualism.