and freedom in his Madonnas di San Sisto,
di Foligno, and del Cardellino. But the students of mediaeval history
in detail know Perugia far better as the lion's lair of one of the
most ferocious broods of heroic ruffians Italy can boast. To them
the name of Perugia suggests at once the great house of the
Baglioni, who drenched Umbria with blood, and gave the broad fields
of Assisi to the wolf, and who through six successive generations
bred captains for the armies of Venice, Florence, Naples, and the
Church.[1] That the trade of Perugino in religious pictures should
have been carried on in the city which shared the factions of the
Baglioni--that Raphael should have been painting Pietas while
Astorre and Simonetto were being murdered by the beautiful young
Grifonetto--is a paradox of the purest water in the history of
civilisation.

[1] Most of the references in this essay are made to the
Perugian chronicles of Graziani, Matarazzo, Bontempi, and
Frolliere, in the _Archivio Storico Italiano_, vol. xvi.
parts 1 and 2. Ariodante Fabretti's _Biografie dei
Capitani Venturieri dell' Umbria_ supply some details.

The art of Perugino implied a large number of devout and wealthy
patrons, a public not only capable of comprehending him, but also
eager to restrict his great powers within the limits of purely
devotional delineation. The feuds and passions of the Baglioni, on
the other hand, implied a society in which egregious crimes only
needed success to be accounted glorious, where force, cruelty, and
cynical craft reigned supreme, and where the animal instincts
attained gigantic proportions in the persons of splendid young
athletic despots. Even the names of these Baglioni, Astorre,
Lavinia, Zenobia, Atalanta, Troilo, Ercole, Annibale, Ascanio,
Penelope, Orazio, and so forth, clash with the sweet mild forms of
Perugino, whose very executioners are candidates for Paradise, and
kill their martyrs with compunction.

In Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries such
contradictions subsisted in the same place and under the conditions
of a common culture, because there was no limit to the development
of personality. Character was far more absolute then than now. The
force of the modern world, working in the men of those times like
powerful wine, as yet displayed itself only as a spirit of freedom
and expansion and revolt. The strait laces of mediaeval Christianity
were loosened. The coercive action of publi