incerest
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