Spello and Pintoricchio

  

 

 

 

Leaving Assisi, Edward Hutton visited Spello to see the work of the Renaissance painter Pintoricchio in the Baglioni chapel of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

 

Spello is so near to Assisi, and the way thither by the old road of Porta Nuova is so pleasant, that all save those who are desperate with hurry should walk or drive thither from the city of S. Francis. There is but little to be seen: a few Roman remains, an ampitheatre, a triumphal arch in ruin, two gateways, Porta Veneris and Porta Urbica, over which lean the heads of two men and a woman; and, save for a sculpture here and there, that is all that is left of the Roman Hispellum. It was not, however, to find Roman things that I came to Spello on her little hill, but to see the work of the great and exquisite sentimentalist, Pintoricchio. Nowhere save in Siena or Rome can you see him so well as in this small clambering city, where in 1501—the year in which Perugino was painting in the Cambio—he was busy with his dainty modish stories, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. A painter who delighted in beauty, you might be tempted to say, as you look on his charming decorative work of 1501 in the Baglioni chapel here, with its original majolica pavement of Deruta tiles. Nor, after all, would you be wrong. Beauty conceived as he conceived it, was his conscious aim. I do not know in all his work a woman who is not surpassingly pretty. He pleases us by the lightness of his touch, the daintiness of his perfect handling, the nicety of his finish. He is so much greater in the Sistine Chapel than anywhere else that we are always startled to find so much promise, after all, merely talent. He seems to have been so susceptible to influence that in the company of great men he becomes almost one of them, just as when left to himself, or with the subtle and scornful Perugino, he becomes—well, just a painter of “out of doors”, a “space composer”, as Mr. Berenson has said, but so much less great than his master....

In the Baglioni chapel, one sees on the left the Annunciation, in front the Nativity, and on the right Christ among the Doctors, with an elaborate Renaissance temple in the background. The best of these is, to my mind, the Annunciation. For once Pintoricchio seems to have been possessed, really captured, by the vision of Mary. She, that beautiful maid, blessed among women, wearied but listening to our devotion, is still in the dawn of her simplicity, reading her Book of Hours, when suddenly, before she can turn the page, God has sent His messenger, a kind of spiritual knight, to tell her of her destiny. So it is in the midst of her dream that she is interrupted, and suddenly confronted with Love Himself, whose Mother, in a less happy way than in the old Greek world, but with a new tenderness and refinement, she, scarcely wakened to life as yet, is to be. Here is the story as it has been told to us in our childhood, not actually as it came to us then, but as we remember it now when we are older. In the Nativity, Pintoricchio is less fine, is, indeed, what we have come to regard him—a mere pupil of Perugino, without that master’s magical spaciousness and splendour of proportion. It is the same with the Christ among the Doctors, and yet the picture strikes one. This man might surely have been a great painter had he been brought up in the intellectual Florentine tradition. But Umbria, with her light and space and gentle landscapes, soft hills and wide valleys full of sunshine, was too enervating for a personality so facile as to be susceptible to every influence. In contact with Rome, he achieved a kind of greatness, but here it was otherwise; if he understood the achievement of Perugino, he was yet unable to express himself through the same medium of perfect spaciousness and light.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 46-47.