painted,
alone though in fours, or fives, or in crowds. Their relations to each
other are purely architectural: it is a matter of mere symmetry, even as
it is with the mouldings or carvings of the frame which surrounds them.
Superficially, taken merely as so many columns, or half-arches of the
pinnacled whole of the composition, they are, in his larger works, more
rigorously related to each other than are the figures of any other
painter of severely architectural groups; compared with Perugino,
the figures in Bellini's or Mantegna's most solemn altarpieces are
irrelevant to each other: one saint is turning too much aside, another
looking too much on his neighbour. Not so with Perugino: his figures
are all in relation to one another. The scarf floating in strange
snakelike convolutions, from the shoulder of the one angel flying,
cutting across the pale blue air as a skater cuts across the ice, floats
and curls in distinct reference to the ribbons which twist, like lilac
or yellow scrolls, about the head and neck of the other angel; the lute,
with down-turned bulb, of the one seraph, his shimmering purple or
ultramarine robe clinging in tight creases round his feet in the breeze
of heaven, is rigorously balanced by the viol, upturned against the
stooping head, of his fellow-seraph; the white-bearded anchorite
stretches forth his right foot in harmony with the outstretched left
foot of the scarlet-robed cardinal; the dainty arch-angelic warrior
drolly designated as Scipio, or Cincinnatus on the wall of the Money
Changer's Hall turns his delicate, quaintly-crested head, and raises
his vague-looking eyes to match the upturned plumed head of the other
celestial knight. All the figures are distinctly connected with each
other; but they are connected as are the pillarets, various, but
different, which balance each other in length and thickness and
character, a twisted with a twisted one, a twin, strangely linked pair
with another such, on the symmetrically sloping front of some Lombard
cathedral; the connection is purely outer, purely architectural; and the
solitude of each figure as a human being, as a body and a mind, is only
the more complete. There is no grouping in these cunningly balanced
altarpieces; there is no common employment or movement, no action or
reaction. Angels and warriors and saints and sibyls stand separate,
the one never touching the other, apart, each alone against the pale
greenish background. They may l