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Are they really saints and angels, and prophets and sibyls? Surely not–for all such act or suffer; for each of these there is a local habitation, and a definite duty. These strange creatures of Perugino’s are not supernatural beings in the same sense as are those robed in iridescent, impalpable glory of Angelico; or those others, clothed in more than human muscle and sinew, of the vault of the Sixtine. What are they? Not visions become concrete, but the act of vision personified. They are not the objects of religious feeling; they are its most abstract, intense reality. Yes, they are reality. They are no far-fetched fancies of the artist. They are souls and soul-saturated, soul-moulded bodies which he saw around him. For in that Umbria of the dying fifteenth century–where the old cities, their old freedom and industry and commerce well-nigh dwindled to nothing, had shrunk each on its mountain-side into mere huge barracks of mercenary troopers or strongholds of military bandit nobles, continually besieged and sacked and heaped with massacre by rival families and rival factions; where in the open country, the villagers, pent-up in fortified farms and barns, were burnt, women and children, with the stored-up fodder, or slaughtered and cast in heaps into the Tiber, and every year the tangled brushwood of ilex and oak and briars encroached further upon the devastated cornfields and oliveyards, and the wolves and foxes roamed nearer and nearer to the cities–in this terrible barbarous Umbria of the days of Caesar Borgia, the soul developed to strange unearthly perfection. It developed by the force of antagonism and isolation. This city of Perugia, which was governed by the most ferocious and treacherous little mercenary captains; whose dark precipitous streets were full of broil and bloodshed, and whose palaces full of evil, forbidden lust and family conspiracy, was one of the most pious in all Italy. Wondrous miraculous preachers, inspired and wild, were for ever preaching in the midst of the iniquity; holy monks and nuns were for ever seeing visions and curing the incurable; churches and hospitals were being erected throughout town and country; novices crowded the ever-increasing convents. Sensitive souls were sickened by the surrounding wickedness, and terrified lest it should triumph over them; resist it, bravely expose themselves to it, prevent or mitigate the evil of others they dared not: a moral plague was thick in the air, and those who would escape infection must needs fly, take refuge in strange spiritual solitude, in isolated heights where the moral air was rarefied and icy. Of the perfectly human, sociable devotion of the days of St. Francis, of the active benevolence and righteousness, there was now no question: the wolves had become too frightfully numerous and ravenous to be preached to like that Brother Wolf of the Flowerets of St. Francis. Active good there could now no longer be: the pure soul became inactive, passive, powerless over the evil around, contemplating for ever a distant, ineffable excellence; aspiring, sterile, and meagre, at being absorbed into that glory of perfect virtue at which it was for ever gazing. This solitary and inactive devotion, raised far above this world, is the feeling out of which are moulded those scarce embodied souls of Perugino’s. Those emaciated hectic young faces, absorbed in one ineffable passion, which in their weakness and intensity are so infinitely feminine, are indeed mainly the faces of women–of those noble and holy ladies like Atalanta Baglioni, living in moral solitude among their turbulent clan of evil fathers and brothers and husbands: the victims, or worse, the passive spectators, the passive accomplices, of iniquity of all sorts, whom the grand old chronicler, Matarazzo, shows by glimpses, walking through the blood and lust-soiled houses of the brilliant and horrible Gianpavolos and Semonettos and Griffones of Perugia, pure and patient like nuns, and as secluded in mind as in any cloister. Theirs are these faces, and at the same time the faces which vaguely, confusedly looked down upon them, glorified reflections of their own, from above. These creatures of Perugino’s are what every great artist’s works must be–at once the portrait of those for whom he paints, and the portrait of their ideals, that is, of their intenser selves. He is the painter of the city where, in the Italian Renaissance, the unmixed devotional feeling, innate in the country of St. Francis, untroubled by Florentine scepticism or Lombard worldly sense, thrust back and concentrated upon itself by surrounding brutal wickedness, existed most intense; he is the painter of this kind of devotion. The very daintiness of accessory, the delicate embroidered robes, the long fringed scarves, the embossed armour, light and pliable like silk, which cannot wound the tender young archangels, the carefully waved and curled hair–all this is the religious luxuriousness of nuns and novices, the one vent for all love of beauty and ease and costliness of the poor delicate creatures, worn and galled by their shapeless hair cloth, living and sleeping in the dreary whitewashed cell. This is unmixed devotion, religious contemplation and aspiration absolutely separated from any other sort of moral feeling; there is the destructive wrath of righteousness in the prophets of Michael Angelo, and the gentleness of candour and charity in the Florentine virgins of Raphael; there is the serenity and solemnity of moral wisdom in Bellini, and the sweetness and cordiality of domestic love in Titian; there is even the half-animal motherly love in Correggio; there is, in almost all the schools of Italian painting, some character of human goodness; but in Perugino there is none of these things. Nothing but the one all-absorbing, abstract, devotional feeling–intense passive contemplation of the unattainable good; souls purged of every human desire or will, isolated from all human affection and action, raised above the limits of time and space; souls which have long ceased to be human beings and can never become angels, hovering, half pained, half joyful, in a limbo of endless spiritual desire.