andscape which was then highly
esteemed. It is said that Francesco del Pugliese would fain have given
to the aforesaid nuns three times as much money as they had paid to
Pietro, and in addition offered to give them a similar painting made
by the artist's own hand; and they would not agree, because Pietro
said that he could never equal that original." This noble creation of
religious art is now in the Pitti Palace at Florence, and fully bears
out Vasari's appreciative criticism: in composition, in beauty of type
in the mourning women and men, in the lax body of the dead Saviour, in
the exquisite landscape with its trees defined against the far sky,
our master touches here a very high level in religious art. As usual
with works of this importance he fully signed it, on the rock on
which the Christ is laid--

PETRUS PERUSINUS PINXIT A.D.
MCCCCLXXXXV;

and the very careful studies which he made for the groups in this
picture may be seen among the drawings of the Uffizi collection.

When we consider that the magnificently virile portrait of Francesco
delle Opere (1494), now in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, belongs to this
same period, as well as the lovely "Madonna with Saints" of S.
Agostino at Cremona (1494, signed and dated), the "Ascension of
Christ," painted for S. Pietro at Perugia (1495, now at Lyons Hotel de
Ville), and the grand altar-piece of the Vatican (1496), which I shall
describe more fully later, we shall agree with the critics (Crowe and
Cavalcaselle), who describe the year 1495 as "remarkable in the career
of Vannucci. It was that in which an Umbrian ... successfully applied
the laws of composition and added a calm tenderness to the gravity of
the Florentine school; and through his influence on Fra Bartolommeo
and Raphael replaced, as far as it was possible, the pious mysticism
that had perished with Angelico." The master's influence on Fra
Bartolommeo may be clearly traced in the "Pieta" of S. Chiara, the
forerunner of the Frate's own noble work; and it was not far from this
very time (1495) that the young Rafaelle Sanzio must have entered his
Perugian workshop.

II

We have now traced the art of Pietro Vannucci from its first
beginnings in the workshop of some unknown teacher at Perugia to the
time when he was one of the accepted masters of Italian art, as much
at home in Florence--that glowing centre of artistic impulse and
creation--as in his own P