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Such is the work. Let us seek the master. Pietro Vannucci, of Citta della Pieve, surnamed Perugino, Petrus de Castro Plebis, as he signed himself, lived, as tradition has it, in a very good house in Via Deliziosa. Via Deliziosa is one of the many quiet little paved lanes of Perugia, steep and tortuous, looking up at whose rough scarred houses you forever see overgrown plants of white starred basil or grey marjoram bursting out of broken ewers and pipkins on the boards before the high windows, or trails of mottled red and green tomatos, or long crimson-tasselled sprays of carnation dangling along the broken, blackened masonry, crevassed and held together by iron clamps; where, at every sudden turn, you get, through some black and oozy archway, a glimpse of green sun-gilded vineyard and distant hills, hazy and blue through the yellow summer air. Here, in the best part of the town, Perugino had his house and his workshop. In the house, full of precious stuffs and fine linen and plate and everything which a wealthy burgher could desire, lived the handsome wife of the master, for whom he was for ever designing and ordering new clothes, and whose beautiful hair he loved himself to dress in strange fantastic diadems and helmets of minute plaits and waves and curls, that she might go through the town as magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady of the Baglionis or Antinoris or Della Staffas. In the workshop was the master and a host of pupils: Giannicola Manni, Doni, the Alfani, Tiberio d’Assisi; the exquisite anonymous stranger, of whom we know only as John the Spaniard, and perhaps that gentle fair feminine boy from Urbino, whom, in half-womanish gear and with wonderful delicate feathers and jewels in his hair, Perugino painted among the prophets in the Money Changer’s Hall. A workshop indeed. Not merely the studio of a master and his pupils, but an enormous manufactory of works of devotional art; the themes of Perugino, the same saints, the same madonnas, the same angels, in the same groups, for ever repeated in large and small, some mere copies, others slightly varied or composed of various incoherent portions, by the pupil; some half by the master, half by the pupil, some possibly touched up by him, one or two wholly from his own exquisite hand. Things of all degrees of merit and execrableness, to suit the richest and the poorest; all could be had at that workshop, for Master Pietro had the monopoly of the art, good bad, or indifferent, of the country. You could order designs for wood carvings or silver ware; you could hire church banners, of which store was kept to be let out for processions at so much the hour. You could obtain men to set up triumphal arches of cardboard, and invent moulds for ornamental sweetmeats, like those of Astorre Baglioni’s wedding; patterns, doubtless also for embroidery and armour embossing; you could have a young Raphael Santi set to repeating some Marriage of the Virgin for a Sforza or a Baglioni, or some tattered smearer to copy a copy of some madonna for a village church; or you could commission the master himself to go to Rome and paint a wall of Pope Sixtus’s Chapel. For there never was a manufactory of art carried on more methodically or satisfactorily than this one. There never was a commercial speculator who knew so well how much good and bad he could afford and venture to give; who knew his public so thoroughly. He had, in his youth and poverty, invented, discovered (which shall we call it?) the perfection of devotional painting, that which perfectly satisfied his whole pious Umbria, and every pious man or woman of more distant parts: a certain number of types, a certain expression, a certain mode of grouping, a certain manner of colouring which constituted a perfect whole; a conception to embody which most completely he had in his youth worked like a slave, seeking, perfecting all that which belonged to the style: the clear, delicate colour, the exquisite, never excessive finish, the infinitely delicate modelling of finger and wrist, of eyelid and lip, the diaphanous sheen of light, soft, scarcely coloured hair on brow and temple and cheek; he had coolly turned away from everything else. The problems of anatomy, of perspective, of light and shade, and of grouping, at which in Florence he had seen men like Pollaiolo, Ghirlandaio, Filippino, Lionardo wasting their youth, he never even glanced at. No real bodies were required for his saints as long as he could give them the right, wistful faces; no tangible background, no well-defined composition. All this was unnecessary; and he wanted only the necessary. When he had got the amount and sort of skill required for this narrow style, he stopped; when he had invented the three or four types of faces, attitude, and composition, he ceased inventing. He had the means of making a fortune. All that remained was to organise his mechanism, to arrange that splendid system of repeating, arranging, altering, copying, on the part of himself and his scholars, by which he could, without further enlarging style or ideas, furnish Umbria and Italy with the pure devotional painting it required, in whatever amount and of whatever degree of excellence it might wish. He succeeded. True, other artists sneered at him, like that young Buonarroti, who had called him a blunderer; true, the Florentines complained that when he painted their fresco for them at S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, he had cheated them, giving mere copies of works they had had from him twenty years before. About the judgment of other painters he cared not a fig; success was the only test; to the Florentines he calmly answered that as those figures had pleased them twenty years before, they ought to please them now; that he at least was not going to seek anything new as long as the old sufficed. For men who grew old in constant attempts after new styles, new muscles, new draperies, like Signorelli yonder labouring solitary on the rock of Orvieto, spending years in cramming new figures into spaces which he, Perugino, would have finished in a month with six isolated saints and a bit of blue sky; or frittered away time in endless sketches, endless cooking of new paints and trying of new washes, like Lionardo da Vinci: or who ruined themselves buying bits of old marble to copy, like crazy Mantegna at Mantua; for all such men as these Perugino must have had a supreme contempt. As long as money came in, all was right; new ideas, improvements, all such things were mere rubbish. Thus he probably preached to his pupils, and kept them carefully to their task of multiplying his own works, till his school became sterile and imbecile; and the young Raphael, in disgust, left him and begged the Lady Giovanna della Rovere for a letter to the Gonfaloniere Soderini, which should open to him the doors of the Florentine schools. With what contempt must not Master Perugino have looked after this departing young Raphael; with what cynical amusement he must have heard how the young fool, once successful, kept for ever altering his style, wearing his frail life out, meditating and working himself into the hectic broken creature whom Marc-Antonio has etched, seated, fagged and emaciated on the steps before his work. We can imagine how Perugino descanted on all this folly to the other young men in his workshop. For he was a cynical man as well as a grasping: he saw no wisdom beyond the desire for money and comfort. He had begun life almost a beggar, sleeping on a chest, going without food, in tatters, giving himself no respite from drudgery, sustained by one idea, one wish!–to be rich. And rich he had become; he had built houses on speculation at Florence, to let them out; and had farms at Citta della Pieve, and land near Perugia. He had obtained all he had ever desired or could conceive desirable: safety from poverty. In other things he did not believe: not in an after life, nor in God, nor in good; all these ideas, says Vasari, could never enter into his porphyry hard brain, “This Peter placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, and for money would have made any evil bargain.”