Edward Hutton wrote a little book on Perugino, the fifteenth century painter has been eclipsed by later masters like his pupil Raphael. Hutton's great admiration for Perugino led him to visit his birthplace, Citta della Pieve.
I went from Perugia to Citta della Pieve—it is but six miles—for the sake of Perugino, who was born there. I stayed there for its own sake. It is a little towered city, some miles from the railway, set on a hill 1,600 feet above sea-level.
The Peruginos which remain there are not the best works of the master. It would seem that for the most part they are the work of his pupils, or of his old age. But the city itself, with its views of the lakes of Trasimeno and Chiusi and the valley southward towards Rome, the quiet peace of the place, the magnificent woods beneath it, are in themselves more valuable than the faint and fading beauty of the mediocre work of the great painter who was born there; for they remain for ever in the memory and seem worth everything else in the world because of the sun—the sun which is the smile of God.
And so it is perhaps to the sun, which robes this little city, too, in a mantle of splendid colour all through the day, and at evening adorns her with bright fire and radiant glory, that we owe the curious fascination of this towered place, so small, so poor, so desolate, so forlorn….
This was the little city in which Perugino received his first impressions of the world. Here he spent his childhood. This was the landscape he first looked on. It was to this, it might seem, … it was to this he returned in his age and these hills and valleys were what his eyes last rested on. The impressions one receives as a child, are they ever lost? Might one not hope then, among these hills and valleys, to discover the secret of his landscapes, so full of golden air and serene light and space, where the hills are almost transparent—the trees, those “trees of heaven”, so delicate and ethereal? Might one not hope here to surprise the secret of the first realistic landscape painter in Italian art?
The first realistic landscape painter in Italian art: but others before him had put landscapes in their pictures even in the fourteenth century, but there was nothing realistic about them. … It is true that Piero della Francesca, a whole generation younger than Perugino, in his Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, and in his portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi, was a master of landscape; but beautiful though these landscapes are, they are “distance” landscapes … they have no middle distance, they are all background and are really experiments, beautiful experiments, in perspective.
Giovanni Bellini: Agony in the Garden
The greatest gift of the true landscape painter is an “emotional response to light”. This response to light is to be found, perhaps for the first time, in the pictures of Giovanni Bellini, a greater master than Perugino. In an early work of his, the Agony in the Garden in the National Gallery, the landscape is marvelously beautiful, most moving and tragically lovely in the light of dawn, but it is dramatic rather than realistic. Who has ever seen such a landscape, even in the Veneto? The painter has conceived it, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the subject of his picture. …
With Perugino it seems the exact opposite is true. The landscape is the subject of his pictures, it is an end in itself, and the figures are there to emphasize or express the emotion of the landscape. Not only is the landscape inspired with light and full of spacious air, it is realistic, as we say, just what his eyes had seen first as a child, what had most filled them with delight all his life long and what he last looked upon as he lay dying, not, it seems, in this little city of Citta della Pieve, his birthplace, but at Fontignano half-way between it and Perugia. …
In an age when all the arts were becoming more and more pagan, his art, at any rate remains wholly and unmistakably Christian, but it is our business to discover what it is that moves us in his pictures, what they really mean to us. The artist who painted the marvellous portraits in the Uffizi was certainly not without ability to represent life, but his large achievement had little to do with life, contenting itself, as it did, with a sort of music; the effect of music, at any rate, composed with space; so that what we see in his pictures, that exquisite grave and serene landscape of Umbria, quite apart from the figures there, moves us as the plainsong does, quite apart from the words which accompany it, to a real religious emotion in which we become partakers of that universal life whose rhythm we seem to have overheard for a moment during an interval of particular silence, when our souls suddenly seem attuned to the movement of eternity. What in fact we see, what in fact he paints, is Umbria Santa.
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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 209, 210-212.
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