The Madonna and Child, with two Saints, was painted in 1493 for the Church of S. Domenico at Fiesole, and was placed in the Uffizi by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold in 1756.  Madonna sits a little indifferent on a throne under an archway, holding the Child, who turns towards St. John Baptist as he gazes languidly on the ground; while St. Sebastian, a beautiful youth, stands on the other side, looking upwards, and though the arrows have pierced his flesh, he is still full of affected grace, and is so occupied with his prayers that he has not noticed them.  On the base of the throne, Perugino has written his name, Petrus Perusinus Pinxit, An. 1493.  It is in such a work as this that Perugino is really least great.  Painted to order, as we may think, it is so full of affectation, of a kind of religiosity, that there is no room left for sincerity.  And yet how well he has composed this picture after all, so that there is no sense of crowding, and the sun and sky are not so far away.  Is it perhaps that in an age that has become suspicious of any religious emotion we are spoiled for such a picture as this, finding in what it may be was just a natural expression of worship to the simple Friars of S. Domenico long ago, all the ritualism and affectation in which we should find it necessary to hide ourselves before we might approach her, as she seemed to them, a Queen enthroned, causa nostrae Laetitiae, between two saints whose very names we find it difficult to remember?  How often in our day has Perugino been accused of insincerity, yet it was not so long ago when he lived.  Almost all his life he was engaged in painting for the Church those things which were most precious in her remembrance.  If men found him insincere, it is strange that among so much that was eager and full of sincerity his work was able to hold its own.  His pupil Raphael, that most beloved name, is represented here in the Uffizi only by the Madonna del Cardellino (1129); for the other works attributed to him in the Tribuna are not his.  The picture is in his early manner, and was painted about 1548.  It has, like so much of Raphael’s work, suffered restoration; and indeed these compositions from his hand no longer hold us as they used to do, whether because of that repainting or no, I know not.  It is as a portrait painter we think of Raphael to-day, and as the painter of the Stanze at Rome; and therefore I prefer to speak of him with regard to his work in the Pitti Gallery rather than here.  With him the Umbrian School passed into the world.

IV.  THE VENETIAN SCHOOL