contemplating for ever a
distant, ineffable excellence; aspiring, sterile, and meagre, at being
absorbed into that glory of perfect virtue at which it was for ever
gazing. This solitary and inactive devotion, raised far above this
world, is the feeling out of which are moulded those scarce embodied
souls of Perugino's. Those emaciated hectic young faces, absorbed in
one ineffable passion, which in their weakness and intensity are so
infinitely feminine, are indeed mainly the faces of women--of those
noble and holy ladies like Atalanta Baglioni, living in moral solitude
among their turbulent clan of evil fathers and brothers and husbands:
the victims, or worse, the passive spectators, the passive accomplices,
of iniquity of all sorts, whom the grand old chronicler, Matarazzo,
shows by glimpses, walking through the blood and lust-soiled houses of
the brilliant and horrible Gianpavolos and Semonettos and Griffones of
Perugia, pure and patient like nuns, and as secluded in mind as in any
cloister. Theirs are these faces, and at the same time the faces which
vaguely, confusedly looked down upon them, glorified reflections of
their own, from above. These creatures of Perugino's are what every
great artist's works must be--at once the portrait of those for whom he
paints, and the portrait of their ideals, that is, of their intenser
selves. He is the painter of the city where, in the Italian Renaissance,
the unmixed devotional feeling, innate in the country of St. Francis,
untroubled by Florentine scepticism or Lombard worldly sense, thrust
back and concentrated upon itself by surrounding brutal wickedness,
existed most intense; he is the painter of this kind of devotion. The
very daintiness of accessory, the delicate embroidered robes, the long
fringed scarves, the embossed armour, light and pliable like silk, which
cannot wound the tender young archangels, the carefully waved and curled
hair--all this is the religious luxuriousness of nuns and novices, the
one vent for all love of beauty and ease and costliness of the poor
delicate creatures, worn and galled by their shapeless hair cloth,
living and sleeping in the dreary whitewashed cell. This is unmixed
devotion, religious contemplation and aspiration absolutely separated
from any other sort of moral feeling; there is the destructive wrath of
righteousness in the prophets of Michael Angelo, and the gentleness of
candour and charity in the Florentine virgins of Raphael; there