ideal
and yet distinctive. Each phase of the world's history and of human
activity receives from him appropriate and elevated expression. What
is characteristic of the frescoes in the Sala del Cambio, and indeed
of the whole manner of Perugino, is that all subjects, sacred or
secular, allegorical or real, are conceived in the same spirit of
restrained and well-bred piety. There is no attempt at historical
propriety or dramatic realism. Grave, ascetic, melancholy faces of
saints are put on bodies of kings, generals, sages, sibyls, and
deities alike. The same ribbands and studied draperies clothe and
connect all. The same conventional attitudes of meditative
gracefulness are repeated in each group. Yet, the whole effect, if
somewhat feeble and insipid, is harmonious and thoughtful. We see
that each part has proceeded from the same mind, in the same mood,
and that the master's mind was no common one, the mood itself was
noble. Good taste is everywhere apparent: the work throughout is a
masterpiece of refined fancy.

To Perugino the representative imagination was of less importance
than a certain delicate and adequately ideal mode of feeling and
conceiving. The consequent charm of his style is that everything is
thought out and rendered visible in one decorous key. The worst that
can be said of it is that its suavity inclines to mawkishness, and
that its quietism borders upon sleepiness. We find it difficult not
to accuse him of affectation. At the same time we are forced to
allow that what he did, and what he refrained from doing, was
determined by a purpose. A fresco of the Adoration of the Shepherds,
and a picture of S. Sebastian in the Pinacoteca, where the archer on
the right hand is drawn in a natural attitude with force and truth,
show well enough what Perugino could do when he chose.

The best way of explaining his conventionality, in which the supreme
power of a master is always verging on the facile trick of a
mannerist, is to suppose that the people of Perugia and the Umbrian
highlands imposed on him this narrow mode of treatment. We may
presume that he was always receiving orders for pictures to be
executed in his well-known manner. Celestial insipidity in art was
the fashion in that Umbria which the Baglioni and the Popes laid
waste from time to time with fire and sword.[1]

[1] It will not be forgotten by students of Italian
history that Umbria was the cradle of the _Battuti_ or
Flagellants,