else.
The problems of anatomy, of perspective, of light and shade, and
of grouping, at which in Florence he had seen men like Pollaiolo,
Ghirlandaio, Filippino, Lionardo wasting their youth, he never even
glanced at. No real bodies were required for his saints as long as he
could give them the right, wistful faces; no tangible background, no
well-defined composition. All this was unnecessary; and he wanted only
the necessary. When he had got the amount and sort of skill required for
this narrow style, he stopped; when he had invented the three or four
types of faces, attitude, and composition, he ceased inventing. He had
the means of making a fortune. All that remained was to organise his
mechanism, to arrange that splendid system of repeating, arranging,
altering, copying, on the part of himself and his scholars, by which he
could, without further enlarging style or ideas, furnish Umbria and
Italy with the pure devotional painting it required, in whatever amount
and of whatever degree of excellence it might wish. He succeeded. True,
other artists sneered at him, like that young Buonarroti, who had called
him a blunderer; true, the Florentines complained that when he painted
their fresco for them at S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, he had cheated
them, giving mere copies of works they had had from him twenty years
before. About the judgment of other painters he cared not a fig; success
was the only test; to the Florentines he calmly answered that as those
figures had pleased them twenty years before, they ought to please them
now; that he at least was not going to seek anything new as long as
the old sufficed. For men who grew old in constant attempts after new
styles, new muscles, new draperies, like Signorelli yonder labouring
solitary on the rock of Orvieto, spending years in cramming new figures
into spaces which he, Perugino, would have finished in a month with six
isolated saints and a bit of blue sky; or frittered away time in endless
sketches, endless cooking of new paints and trying of new washes, like
Lionardo da Vinci: or who ruined themselves buying bits of old marble to
copy, like crazy Mantegna at Mantua; for all such men as these Perugino
must have had a supreme contempt. As long as money came in, all was
right; new ideas, improvements, all such things were mere rubbish. Thus
he probably preached to his pupils, and kept them carefully to their
task of multiplying his own works, till his school became sterile