heart; and Umbria, with a cloyed palate, sees her frescos peel and lets her sanctuaries out to bats and green lizards. Surely the worst form of moral jaundice is where the sufferer watches his affections palsy, but makes no stir.
From the ramp of the citadel at Perugia you can guess what a hornet's nest that grey stronghold of the Baglioni must have been. It commands the great plain and bars the way to Rome. Westward, on a spur of rock, stands Magione and a lonely tower: this was their outpost towards Siena. Eastward there is a white patch on the distant hills--Spello, "mountain built with quiet citadel," quiet enough now. There was always a Baglione at Spello with his eyes set on chance comers from Foligno and Rome. Seen from thence, _Augusta Perusia_ hangs like a storm cloud over her cliffs, impregnable but by strategy, as wicked and beautiful as ever her former masters, the Seven Deadly Sins, grandsons of Fortebraccio. The place is like its history, of course, having, in fact, grown up with it: you might say it was the incarnation of Perugia's spirit; it would only be to admit, what is so obvious over here, that a town is the work of art of that larger soul, the body politic. So to see the crazy streets cut in steps and crevasses across and through the rocks, spanning a gorge with a stone ladder or boring a twisted tunnel under the sheer of the Etruscan walls, to note the churches innumerable and the foundations of the thirty fortress-towers she once had--all this is to read the secret of Perugia's two love affairs. Of her towers Julius II. left but two standing, blind pillars of masonry; but there were thirty of them once, and the Baglioni held them all, for a season. Now it was these wild Baglioni--"filling the town with all manner of evil living," says Matarazzo, but nevertheless intensely beloved for their bold bearing and beauty, as of young hawks;-- it was just these blood-stained striplings, this Semonetto who rode shouting into the Piazza after an affray and swept his clogged hair clear of his eyes that he might see to kill, this black Astorre, "of the few words," who was murdered in his shirt on his marriage-eve by his cousin and best friend; it was this very cousin Grifone, so beautiful that "he seemed an angel of Paradise," who, in his turn, was cut down and laid out with his dead allies below San Lorenzo that his widow might not fail of finding him and his marred fairness--it was just this stormy crew that fell weeping at Suor Brigida's meek feet, confessed their sins and received the Communion (encompassers and encompassed together, and all in a rapture) on the very eve of the great slaughter of 1500; it was they who adorned the Oratory of San Bernardino and made it the miracle of rose- colour and blue that it is; who reared the enormous San Domenico below the Gate of Mars, and who, in this hot-bed of enormity, nurtured Perugino's dreamy Madonnas. What it meant I know not at all. There are other riddles as hard in Umbria. Renan saw the gentle cadence of the landscape--violet hills, the silver gauze of water, oliveyards all of a green mist; read the _Fioretti_ and the dolorous ecstasies of Perugino's Sebastian, and straightway adapted the high-flown parallel worked out in detail by Giotto. Umbria for him was the Galilee of Italy, and Francis son of Bernard an _avatar_ of Christ. But Renan was apt to allow his emotions to ride him. Another dazzling contrast, which has recently exercised another dextrous Frenchman, is Siena with her Saint Catherine and her Sodoma who betrayed her--Saint Catherine, as great a force politically as she was spiritually, and Sodoma, who painted her like a Dana with love-glazed eyes fainting before the apparition of the Crucified Seraph.
There is nothing like this in the history of Tuscany, whose palaces not long were fortresses nor her monks at any time successful politicians. Cosimo had pulled down the Florentine towers or ever the last Oddi had loosed hold of Ridolfo's throat, I know that Siena is just within that province geographically; in temperament, in art and manner, she has always shown herself intensely Umbrian. Take, then, the case of Savonarola. The Florentines received him gladly enough and heard him with honest admiration, even enthusiasm. Still, there is reason to believe they took him, in the main, spectacularly, as they also took that portentous old monomaniac Gemisthos Pletho who made religions as we might make pills. For, observe, Savonarola lost his head--and his life, good soul!--where the Florentines did not. The cobbler went beyond his last when the _Frate_ essayed politics. He suffered accordingly. But in Perugia, in Siena, in Gubbio and Orvieto, the great revivalists Bernardine, Catherine, Fra Roberto, held absolute rule over body and soul. For the moment Baglione and Oddi kissed each other; all feuds were stayed; a man might climb the black alleys of a night without any fear of a knife to yerk him (the Ancient's word) under the ribs or noose round his neck to swing him up to the archway withal. So Catherine brought back Boniface (and much trouble) from Avignon, and Da Lecce wrote out a new constitution for some rock-bound hive of the hills, whose crowd wailing in the market-place knew the ecstasy of repentance, and ran riot in religious orgies very much after the fashion of the Greater Dionysia or, say, the Salvation Army. And how Niccol Alunno would have painted the Salvation Army!
So it does seem that the two great passions of Umbria burnt themselves out together. They were, indeed, the two ends of the candle. When the Baglioni fell in the black work of two August nights, only one escaped. And with them died the love of the old lawless life and the infinite relish there was for some positive foretaste of the life of the world to come. Both lives had been lived too fast: from that day Perugia fell into a torpor, as Perugino, the glass of his time and place, also fell. Perugino, we know, had his doubts concerning the immortality of the soul, but painted on his beautiful cloister-dreams, and knocked down his saints to the highest bidder.[1] Vasari assures me that the chief solace of the old prodigal in his end of days was to dress his young wife's hair in fantastic coils and braids. A prodigal he was--true Peruginese in that-- prodigal of the delicate meats his soul afforded. His end may have been unedifying; it must at least have been very pitiful. Nowadays his name stands upon the Corso Vannucci of the town he uttered, and in the court wall of a little recessed and colonnaded house in the Via Deliziosa. Meantime his frescos drop mildewed from chapel walls or are borne away to a pauper funeral in the Palazzo Communale.
[Footnote 1: See, however, what he has to say for himself in Chapter V. _ante._]
In his finely studied _Sensations_ M. Paul Bourget, it seems to me, flogs the air and fails to climb it when he struggles to lay open the causes of poor Vannucci's embittering. If ever painting took up the office of literature it was in the fifteenth century. The _quattrocentisti_ stand to Italy for our Elizabethan dramatists. This may have produced bad painting: Mr. George Moore will tell you that it did. I am not sure that it very greatly matters, for, failing a literature which was really dramatic, really poetical, really in any sense representative, it was as well that there led an outlet somewhere. At any rate Lippi and Botticelli, to those who know them, are expressive of the Florentine temper when Pulci and Politian are distorted echoes of another; Perugino leads us into the recesses of Perugia while Graziani keeps us fumbling at the lock. And Perugino's languorous boys and maids are the figments of a riotous erotic, of a sensuous fancy without imagination or intelligence or humour. His Alcibiades, or Michael Archangel, seems green-sick with a love mainly physical; his Socrates has the combed resignation of his Jeromes and Romualds--smoothly ordered old men set in the milky light of Umbrian mornings and dreaming out placid lives by the side of a moonfaced Umbrian beauty, who is now Mary and now Luna as chance motions his hand. How penetrating, how distinctive by the side of them seems Sandro's slim and tearful Anima Mundi shivering in the chill dawn! With what a strange magic does Filippino usher in the pale apparition of the Mater Dolorosa to his Bernard, or flush her up again to a heaven of blue-green and a glory of burning cherubim! This he does, you remember, with rocket-like effect, in a chapel of the Minerva in Rome. But it is the unquenchable thirst of the Umbrians for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet for their passion to be found only in bloodshed or fainting below the Cross, some fierce and untameable animal quality such as you see to-day in the torn gables, the towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit which informed and made these things you get in Perugino's pictures--in the hot sensualism of their colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. The desire could never be fed and the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work on the facade of San Bernardino, Duccio was a Florentine, but where in Florence would you see his like? What a revel of disproportion in these long-legged nymphs, full- lipped and narrow-eyed as any of Rossetti's curious imaginings. Take the Povert, a weedy girl with the shrinking paps of a child. Here again (exquisite as she is in modelling and intensity of expression) you get the enticement of a malformation which is absolutely un-Greek--unless you are to count Phrygia within the magic ring-fence--and only to be equalled by the luxury of Beccadelli. You get that