carefully finished, it would have been
more to your honour and our satisfaction." She here goes straight to
the point in noting--as we shall do later--that the master was
becoming careless and hasty in his execution. On the other hand, it is
fair to remember that the subject was not probably congenial, that he
was tied hand and foot in his treatment by the learned lady's written
instructions (on hearing that he had represented Venus as nude, she
declared that if one single figure were altered the whole fable would
be ruined), and it is only in the wide sweep of clear sky and hills
and river that the artist really finds himself again.

Another commission of this time in Florence was to complete the
Descent from the Cross begun in 1503 by Filippino Lippi, and left
unfinished at his death in 1505. This picture, which was destined for
the SS. Annunziata at Florence, was completed by Perugino, and is now
in the Accademia. The lower portion is here by our master, and,
considering the initial difficulty of working upon another man's
conception, the result is to be praised. Crowe, indeed, calls the
Virgin fainting in the arms of the three Maries one of the noblest
conceptions of his brush. But the same cannot be said of his joint
commission of the Assumption, painted also for the SS. Annunziata in
this summer of 1505. Dr. Williamson, whose monograph I have already
mentioned, and who went to the pains of visiting all these works of
Perugino scattered by Napoleon through the small provincial museums of
France, noted that the resemblance between the Assumption and the
Ascension of Lyons, which had been painted in 1495 for S. Pietro at
Perugia, is so close as to show the artist had hardly troubled to make
any change. Not only this, but the Coronation of the Virgin, of the
Perugian Gallery, shows groups identical with both the above
paintings, and this Assumption, for which, as Crowe says, "he fell
back on the model of the Lyons Ascension," is painted in a slovenly
and careless manner.

When we remember what Florence was in this early sixteenth century--a
city keenly intellectual, alive to art as perhaps no city, save
Athens, has ever been before or since, and highly critical and
censorious--we need not be surprised that the master, thus openly
convicted of plagiarism from his earlier works and of careless
technique, was censured by his friends and attacked by his enemies.
Vasari tells us that "when the aforesaid work" (the Assum