is the
serenity and solemnity of moral wisdom in Bellini, and the sweetness and
cordiality of domestic love in Titian; there is even the half-animal
motherly love in Correggio; there is, in almost all the schools of
Italian painting, some character of human goodness; but in Perugino
there is none of these things. Nothing but the one all-absorbing,
abstract, devotional feeling--intense passive contemplation of the
unattainable good; souls purged of every human desire or will, isolated
from all human affection and action, raised above the limits of time and
space; souls which have long ceased to be human beings and can never
become angels, hovering, half pained, half joyful, in a limbo of endless
spiritual desire.

Such is the work. Let us seek the master. Pietro Vannucci, of Citta
della Pieve, surnamed Perugino, Petrus de Castro Plebis, as he signed
himself, lived, as tradition has it, in a very good house in Via
Deliziosa. Via Deliziosa is one of the many quiet little paved lanes of
Perugia, steep and tortuous, looking up at whose rough scarred houses
you forever see overgrown plants of white starred basil or grey marjoram
bursting out of broken ewers and pipkins on the boards before the
high windows, or trails of mottled red and green tomatos, or long
crimson-tasselled sprays of carnation dangling along the broken,
blackened masonry, crevassed and held together by iron clamps; where,
at every sudden turn, you get, through some black and oozy archway, a
glimpse of green sun-gilded vineyard and distant hills, hazy and blue
through the yellow summer air. Here, in the best part of the town,
Perugino had his house and his workshop. In the house, full of precious
stuffs and fine linen and plate and everything which a wealthy burgher
could desire, lived the handsome wife of the master, for whom he was for
ever designing and ordering new clothes, and whose beautiful hair he
loved himself to dress in strange fantastic diadems and helmets of
minute plaits and waves and curls, that she might go through the town as
magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady of the Baglionis or
Antinoris or Della Staffas. In the workshop was the master and a host
of pupils: Giannicola Manni, Doni, the Alfani, Tiberio d'Assisi; the
exquisite anonymous stranger, of whom we know only as John the Spaniard,
and perhaps that gentle fair feminine boy from Urbino, whom, in
half-womanish gear and with wonderful delicate feathers and jewels in
his h