We English are fortunate in possessing one of Perugino’s sincerest devotional oil pictures[218].  His frescoes of “S.  Sebastian” at Panicale, and of the “Crucifixion” at Florence, are tolerably well known through reproductions[219]; while the “Vision of S. Bernard” at Munich and the “Pieta” in the Pitti Gallery are familiar to all travelled students of Italian painting.  These masterpieces belong to Perugino’s best period, when his inspiration was fresh, and his enthusiasm for artistic excellence was still unimpaired; and when, as M. Rio thinks, the failure of his faith had not yet happened.  It is only at Perugia, however, in the Sala del Cambio, that we are able to gauge the extent of his power and to estimate the value of his achievement beyond the pale of strictly religious themes.

Early in the course of his career Perugino seems to have become contented with a formal repetition of successful motives, and to have checked the growth of his genius by adhering closely to a prescribed cycle of effects.  The praises of his patrons and the prosperity of his trade proved to his keen commercial sense that the raised ecstatic eyes, the upturned oval faces, the pale olive skin, the head inclined upon the shoulder, the thin fluttering hair, the ribands and the dainty dresses of his holy persons found great favour in Umbrian palaces and convents.  Thenceforward he painted but little else; and when, in the Sala del Cambio, he was obliged to treat the representative heroes of Greek and Roman story, he adopted the same manner[220].  Leonidas, the lionhearted Spartan, and Cato, the austere Roman, who preferred liberty to life, bend their mild heads like flowers in Perugino’s frescoes, and gather up their drapery in studied folds with celestial delicacy.  Jove is a reproduction of the Eterno Padre, conceived as a benevolent old man for a conventional painting of the “Trinity;” and Ganymede is a page-boy with the sweet submissive features of Tobias.  Already Perugino had opened a manufactory of pietistic pictures, and was employing many pupils on his works.  He coined money by fixing artificially beautiful faces upon artificially elegant figures, placing a row of these puppets in a landscape with calm sky behind them, and calling the composition by the name of some familiar scene.  His inspiration was dead, his invention exhausted; his chief object seemed to be to make his trade thrive.

Perugino will always remain a problem to the psychologist who believes in physiognomy, as well as to the student of the passionate times in which he lived.  His hard unsympathetic features in the portraits at Perugia and Florence do not belie, but rather win credence for Vasari’s tales about his sordid soul.[221] Local traditions and contemporary rumours, again, give colour to what Vasari relates about his infidelity; while the criminal records of Florence prove that he was not over-scrupulous to keep his hands from violence.[222] How could such a man, we ask ourselves,