ng in Rome as
Perugino's assistant during this pontificate of Pope Sixtus. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle say of this artist: "He was a Perugian by birth and
education, had followed with moderate talent the lessons of Buonfigli
and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and afterwards joined the atelier of
Perugino. He had all the qualities that should be sought in a
subordinate, and might have become indispensable to one who undertook
large commissions and required an orderly superintendent for his
apprentices. It was natural that Perugino should take him into
partnership and give him a third of his profits. Nor do the Sixtine
frescoes discountenance the belief that the two men stood in this
relation to each other in 1484."

When Perugino left Rome for Florence in 1486, Pinturicchio remained
there, obtained commissions from the great families of the Della
Rovere and Cibo, and from the Borgia Pope Alexander VI., for whom he
decorated the famous "Appartamento Borgia" within the Vatican. He
thus began to assume the position of an independent master; but if we
trace his hand (especially in the children and landscape backgrounds)
in the two Sistine wall paintings which I have just mentioned--though
working still under the elder master's supervision and assistance--it
is Perugino alone who comes before us, in his full strength, in the
"Delivery to St. Peter of the Keys." The subject, it has been well
said, was a simple incident, but demanded "from the deep meaning
attached to it as related to the history of the Roman church a certain
grandeur and solemnity of treatment"; and here at once we see the full
influence upon Pietro of his Florentine training, combined, in a very
interesting way, with those earlier Umbrian elements which still
remained with him as the strongest impulse, and which he had learnt
from his earlier Perugian master, or later, not improbably, from the
great Piero della Francesca. No writer upon Umbrian art can afford to
neglect its wonderful landscape backgrounds, often poetic and
fantastic, as in the art of Pinturicchio, but always with this sense
of roominess, of vastness, and spaciousness, which Mr. Berenson has
very happily defined by the phrase of "space-composition"; and,
writing of this very fresco in an earlier work, I compared within the
Sistina the crowded frescoes and stir of movement of Botticelli or
Cosimo Rosselli with those wide spaces of Perugino's "Granting of the
Keys," where our eyes are carried onwards from the