FullReads

It is the painting of solitude; of the isolated soul, alone, unaffected by any other, unlinked in any work, or feeling, or suffering, with any other soul, nay even with any physical thing. The men and women of Perugino are the most completely alone that any artist ever painted, alone though in fours, or fives, or in crowds. Their relations to each other are purely architectural: it is a matter of mere symmetry, even as it is with the mouldings or carvings of the frame which surrounds them. Superficially, taken merely as so many columns, or half-arches of the pinnacled whole of the composition, they are, in his larger works, more rigorously related to each other than are the figures of any other painter of severely architectural groups; compared with Perugino, the figures in Bellini’s or Mantegna’s most solemn altarpieces are irrelevant to each other: one saint is turning too much aside, another looking too much on his neighbour. Not so with Perugino: his figures are all in relation to one another. The scarf floating in strange snakelike convolutions, from the shoulder of the one angel flying, cutting across the pale blue air as a skater cuts across the ice, floats and curls in distinct reference to the ribbons which twist, like lilac or yellow scrolls, about the head and neck of the other angel; the lute, with down-turned bulb, of the one seraph, his shimmering purple or ultramarine robe clinging in tight creases round his feet in the breeze of heaven, is rigorously balanced by the viol, upturned against the stooping head, of his fellow-seraph; the white-bearded anchorite stretches forth his right foot in harmony with the outstretched left foot of the scarlet-robed cardinal; the dainty arch-angelic warrior drolly designated as Scipio, or Cincinnatus on the wall of the Money Changer’s Hall turns his delicate, quaintly-crested head, and raises his vague-looking eyes to match the upturned plumed head of the other celestial knight. All the figures are distinctly connected with each other; but they are connected as are the pillarets, various, but different, which balance each other in length and thickness and character, a twisted with a twisted one, a twin, strangely linked pair with another such, on the symmetrically sloping front of some Lombard cathedral; the connection is purely outer, purely architectural; and the solitude of each figure as a human being, as a body and a mind, is only the more complete. There is no grouping in these cunningly balanced altarpieces; there is no common employment or movement, no action or reaction. Angels and warriors and saints and sibyls stand separate, the one never touching the other, apart, each alone against the pale greenish background. They may look, the one towards the other, but they never see each other. They exist quite single and isolated, each unconscious that there is any other. Another–indeed, there is no other; in reality, every one is in complete solitude; it is only the canvas which makes them appear in the same place. They are not in the same place, or rather there is no place; the soft green field, the blue hills, darkening against the greenish evening sky, the spare, thinly leaved little trees, the white tower in the distance, this little piece of Umbrian country has nothing to do with any of them. They are nowhere; or rather each taken singly is nowhere. Place, like subject and action, has been eliminated; everything has, which possibly could. The very bodies seem reduced to the least possible: there is no interest in them: all is concentrated upon the delicate nervous hands, on the faces; in the faces, upon eyes and mouth, till the whole face seems scarcely more than tremulous lips, half parted, raised vividly to kiss, to suck in the impalpable; than dilating pupils, straining vaguely to seize, to absorb, to burn into themselves the invisible. It is the embodiment, with only as little body as is absolutely required, of a soul; and that soul simplified, rarefied into only one condition of being: beatitude of contemplation. As place and action have been eliminated, so also has time: they will for ever remain, alone, in the same attitude; they will never move, never change, never cease; there exists for them no other occupation or possibility. And as the bodies are separate, isolated from all physical objects, so is the soul: it touches no other human soul, touches no earthly interest: it is alone, motionless, space and time and change have ceased for it: contemplating, absorbing for all eternity that which the eye cannot see, nor the hand touch nor the will influence, the mysterious, the ineffable.