central group far
away to the distant temple with its roomy porticoes.

But if the background with its Bramantesque temple and the middle
distance is still purely Umbrian, and seems to foreshadow the
"Sposalizio" at Caen, or at the Brera, in those noble figures grouped
upon the front plane of the composition--many of them obviously
contemporary portraits (one of them in a skullcap being suggested as
the master himself)--we may trace the dominant influence of the great
Florentines, of Masaccio within the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine,
and of the noble fresco art of Domenico Ghirlandajo. And thus Pietro
Perugino combines within himself already the two most important
currents of the art of the Italian Renaissance--that art of Florence,
with its intellectualism, its masterly drawing, its sense of form,
and that lovely devotional spirit of Umbrian art, developed and
inherited from the earlier Sienese. He is at least for us here the
precursor--the "forerunner"; and what his divinely gifted pupil, the
young Raphael of Urbino, was to complete he already foreshadows.

Another point which has not been brought out very fully by our
master's critics is the predominance of fresco painting in his earlier
work. The value of fresco painting to these Italian masters as a
training for eye and hand cannot be too much insisted upon. It needed
both a sure eye and a quick hand, for the painting had to be done at
once when the plaster was ready to receive it; and there can be no
doubt that Pietro's absolute mastery, at this period, of this
difficult art had prepared him for the wonderful series of
altar-pieces in the tempera and oil mediums which we are now about to
study.

[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE DEPOSITION FROM THE CROSS

(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)

This is the famous painting of the dead Christ for the nuns of S.
Chiara, of which Vasari speaks with such enthusiasm, and tells us the
nuns were offered (and refused) three times the contract price for the
picture.

It certainly is a masterpiece of Italian devotional art. It is fully
signed and dated--_Petrus Perusinus Pinxit A. D. MCCCCLXXXXV._--and
there are studies for it in the Uffizi collection of drawings and at
Christ Church, Oxford.]

Perugino, as we have noticed, had returned to Florence in the autumn
of 1486, when the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were no doubt
completed, and soon after this (1489) received an invitation to visit
Orvieto--his altar-piece for