limit to the development
of personality. Character was far more absolute then than now. The
force of the modern world, working in the men of those times like
powerful wine, as yet displayed itself only as a spirit of freedom
and expansion and revolt. The strait laces of mediaeval Christianity
were loosened. The coercive action of public opinion had not yet
made itself dominant. That was an age of adolescence, in which men
were and dared to be _themselves_ for good or evil. Hypocrisy,
except for some solid, well-defined, selfish purpose, was unknown:
the deference to established canons of decorum which constitutes
more than half of our so-called morality, would have been scarcely
intelligible to an Italian. The outlines of individuality were
therefore strongly accentuated. Life itself was dramatic in its
incidents and motives, its catastrophes and contrasts. These
conditions, eminently favourable to the growth of arts and the
pursuit of science, were no less conducive to the hypertrophy of
passions, and to the full development of ferocious and inhuman
personalities. Every man did what seemed good in his own eyes. Far
less restrained than we are by the verdict of his neighbours, but
bound by faith more blind and fiercer superstitions, he displayed
the contradictions of his character in picturesque chiaroscuro. What
he could was the limit set on what he would. Therefore, considering
the infinite varieties of human temperaments, it was not merely
possible, but natural, for Pietro Perugino and Gianpaolo Baglioni to
be inhabitants at the same time of the selfsame city, and for the
pious Atalanta to mourn the bloodshed and the treason of her
Achillean son, the young and terrible Grifone. Here, in a word, in
Perugia, beneath the fierce blaze of the Renaissance, were brought
into splendid contrast both the martial violence and the religious
sentiment of mediaevalism, raised for a moment to the elevation of
fine art.

Some of Perugino's qualities can be studied better in Perugia than
elsewhere. Of his purely religious pictures--altar-pieces of Madonna
and Saints, martyrdoms of S. Sebastian, Crucifixions, Ascensions,
Annunciations, and Depositions from the Cross,--fine specimens are
exhibited in nearly all the galleries of Europe. A large number of
his works and of those of his scholars may be seen assembled in the
Pinacoteca of Perugia. Yet the student of his pietistic style finds
little here of novelty to notice. It is in the