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Updated: June 13, 2025
With Pinturicchio, and Leonardi da Vinci whom we shall see later beside Cesare Michelangelo was ever held in the highest esteem by the duke. The story of that young sculptor's leap into fame may not be so widely known but that its repetition may be tolerated here, particularly since, remotely at least, it touches Cesare Borgia.
Even as many are assisted by fortune without being endowed with much talent, so, on the contrary, there is an infinite number of able men who are persecuted by an adverse and hostile fortune; whence it is clearly manifest that she acknowledges as her children those who depend upon her without the aid of any talent, since it pleases her to exalt by her favour certain men who would never be known through their own merit; which is seen in Pinturicchio of Perugia, who, although he made many works and was assisted by various helpers, nevertheless had a much greater name than his works deserved.
At first they imagined it was Caesar Borgia; but as you may observe, the appearance of the Emperor is that of a man of twenty odd years, and when Pinturicchio painted this, Caesar was about seventeen. So it is more logical to suppose that the model must have been the Pope's eldest son, the Duke of Gandia.
But now that the colors are so wretchedly bedimmed, now that blotches of plastered wall dot the frescos all over, like a mean reality thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions, the next best artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio or Pinturicchio will be he that shall reverently cover their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!
Out along the narrow streets of the town, across the Roman arched bridge, by the market-place to the terraced hillside that overlooked the Umbrian plain, they went; Perugino stout, strong, smooth-faced, with dark, swarthy features; Pinturicchio with downy beard, merry eyes and tall, able form; and lingering behind, came Raphael.
I can scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy, of the heroes and wizards and hippogriffs of the old tales of Oberon and Ogier; the association with the knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this or that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture by Dosso, has made it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of mediæval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, the outlines of peasants' faces things all these of this our own time, of yesterday or to-day; whether all this, running in my mind like so many scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei Medici's poems, has made my studies of rustic poetry more clear or more confused.
And the architecture of Alberti, the decorations of Pinturicchio, remain as spotless of all contact with their evil instincts as the hills they may have looked at, the sea they may have listened to, the eternal verity that two and two make four, which had doubtless passed through their otherwise badly inhabited minds.
It was like strolling in some quaint, ill-trimmed, old garden, finding fresh flowers, fresh bits of lichened walls, fresh fragments of broken earthenware ornaments; or, rather, more like a morning in the Cathedral Library at Siena, the place where the gorgeous choir books are kept, itself illuminated like missal pages by Pinturicchio: amused, delighted, not moved nor fascinated; finding every moment something new, some charming piece of gilding, some sweet plumed head, some quaint little tree or town; making a journey of lazy discovery in a sort of world of Prince Charmings, the real realm of the "Färy Queen," quite different in enchantment from the country of Spenser's Gloriana, with its pale allegoric ladies and knights, half-human, half-metaphysical, and its make-believe allegorical ogres and giants.
For her surpassing beauty this Giulia Farnese has been surnamed La Bella and as Giulia La Bella was she known in her day and she has been immortalized by Pinturicchio and Guglielmo della Porta.
Another friend of Pinturicchio, associated with him in not a few of his works, was Gerino Pistoiese, who was held to be a diligent colourist and a faithful imitator of the manner of Pietro Perugino, with whom he worked nearly up to his death.
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