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Updated: May 13, 2025
Among the other great Italian painters of this century are Fra Angelico, Perugino, Raphael's master, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, the pupil of his uncle, Vasari, almost as distinguished, Botticelli, Titian, and very many others, who would have been famous leaders in art in any other but this supremely great period.
It has often been said, and is no doubt taken from Vasari's book, that in the Borgia Apartment Pinturicchio painted Pope Alexander VI adoring the Virgin represented under the likeness of his beloved, Julia Farnese. The critic must have been confused, because none of these madonnas recalls the face of Giulia la bella, whom people used to call the Bride of Christ.
These early painters have made up their Paganism for themselves, out of all pleasant things they knew; their fancy has brooded upon it; and the very details that make us laugh, the details coming direct from the Middle Ages, the spirit in glaring opposition occasionally to that of Antiquity, bring home to us how completely this Pagan fairyland is a genuine reality to these men. We feel this in nearly all the work of that sort least, in the archæological Mantegna's. We see it beginning in the mere single figures the various drawings of Orpheus, "Orpheus le doux menestrier jouant de flutes et de musettes," as Villon called him, much about that time piping or fiddling among little toy animals out of a Nuremberg box; the drawing of fauns carrying sheep, some with a queer look of the Good Shepherd about them, of Pinturicchio; and rising to such wonderful exhibitions (to me, with their obscure reminiscence of pageants, they always seem like ballets) as Perugino's Ceiling of the Cambio, where, among arabesqued constellations, the gods of antiquity move gravely along: the bearded knight Mars, armed cap-
I do not cross myself before eating nor do I think it incumbent upon me to kneel down on the hard floor in church perhaps because I am not an English bishop. We were sorry for this one and for his young lady, but it was their own doing. We then went into the Libreria to see the frescoes by Pinturicchio which we did not like and spent some little time in attending to them.
Something, it is true, he added beyond the greater mastery of literary form due to training. Even in his most luxuriant descriptions and most sensuous images we find that grace and clearness of vision which characterize the early poetry of the Renaissance proper, and combine in literature the luminous purity of Botticelli and the gem-like detail of Pinturicchio.
By soul I do not mean that energy which enforces righteousness, the dream of the fanatic, the ideal of the law fabricator; but the soul of high freedoms, delights, nobilities. For there is just as much difference between those things as there is between Douglas and Pinturicchio. All of this goes without saying, of course; but I am thinking of the application of these things to you.
We seem unable to breathe, and lack that element of life and picturesqueness which the splendid retinues of nobles in the age of Pinturicchio might have added to the now forlorn Piazza. Yet the material is a fine warm travertine, mellowing to dark red, brightening to golden, with some details, especially the tower of the Palazzo Communale, in red brick.
Then of a sudden I saw Pinturicchio in Lincoln's face, the same gentleness along the sunken cheeks, the same imaginative glow in the whole countenance.
Pinturicchio used to say that a painter could only give the greatest relief to his figures when he had it in himself, without owing anything to principles or to others. He also made works in Perugia, but these were few.
Are those two children the younger sons of Alexander VI? Or are they Lucrezia and Caesar again? I don't know. Behind Paleologos are the Pope's domestic retainers, and among them Pinturicchio himself." After explaining the picture in detail, Kennedy went into the next room, followed by Caesar. This is called the Hall of the Liberal Arts, and is adorned with a large marble mantel.
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