Pintoricchio

Pintoricchio is not one of the most famous painters of the Italian Renaissance, and perhaps no painter who has left us such a mass of work, and work of such interest, has attracted so little criticism and inquiry. From the time of Vasari's slighting biography onwards, he has been included among minor painters and passed over with very superficial examination. No separate life of him in English exists, no attempt has been made to consider his work in anything like exhaustive detail, or to define his charm. It would be idle to claim for him a place in the first rank: some may question his right to stand in the second; in some of the greatest essentials he will not pass muster--yet charm he does possess, qualities whose fascination draws those who are open to it back to him again and again with fresh pleasure; and for this, and because he presents us with so true a type of the Umbrian painter of the Renaissance, it is worth while trying to unravel his history.

Before we try to disentangle the origin of his art, before we compare his different periods and examine the paintings he has left us, we must make some attempt to arrive at his personality, to see the man as he was, to gain what clue we may, by this means, to the work in which his life was spent.

Nothing can be more meagre than the few hints we have of his origin and early history, and yet we can probably construct a pretty correct outline of their chief features. Vermiglioli in 1837 made a careful examination of the archives of Perugia and Siena, and was the first to endeavour to rehabilitate the artist, and to re-awaken that public interest which was so liberally bestowed on him in his lifetime. He was born at Perugia about 1454, if we are to believe Vasari, who tells us that when he died in 1513 he was in his fifty-ninth year. His father was one Benedetto or Benedecto, and he was christened Bernardino Benedetto (afterwards shortened to Betto or Betti). The famous saint, Bernardino of Siena, had died ten years earlier and was canonised in 1550. During his last years his preaching had made a great sensation in Perugia, and no doubt numbers of children born at this time were dedicated to him. A document of 1502 exists at Siena,[1] in which Pintoricchio is styled the son of Benedetto di Biagio, so that we thus learn the bare names of his father and grandfather. We have no means of knowing their standing, but the entire absence of any mention of relatives or inheritance makes it probable that he came of poor people, and was not blessed with any close family ties. We know nothing of what was the childhood of the "little painter," only the nickname of "il sordicchio," the deaf one, suggests that this infirmity may have been one reason why he was dedicated to an artist's career; but the deafness could hardly have been very remarkable, as it is never alluded to otherwise, nor does it appear to have hampered Bernardino's intercourse with the world. There is a faint tradition[2] that his home was near the Porto San Christoforo, which, while hardly worth notice, indicates that his youth was passed in Perugia.

[1] Archivio dei Contratti. Vasari, iii. p. 513, note I.e.

[2] Vermiglioli, p. 8.

From the tendencies which all his life clung about his work, we surmise that he began his artistic career under one of the miniature painters who then flourished in Perugia. Vermiglioli refers to a series of miniature paintings belonging to his family, which Orsini, in his researches into the history of Umbrian painting, had already mentioned as resembling Pintoricchio's work, especially in the use made of architecture. At the time he was growing up there was a flourishing college of miniaturists in Perugia, which had reconstructed its statutes in 1436.

Vasari thus comments upon Bernardino: "Some are helped by fortune, without being much endowed by merit; ... one knows that Fortune has sons who depend on her help without any virtue of their own, and she is pleased that they should owe their exaltation to her favour, when they would never have been known for their own merit."[3] But Vasari evidently knew nothing of the good or bad fortune of Pintoricchio's early days, and was merely balancing his own estimate of the artist against the consideration he received in later years.