the heroes who displayed them in their lives.
Such a dictation was quite in the traditions of the best Italian art.
I have shown in an earlier work--"The Renaissance in Italian Art"--how
this was probably the case in the famous frescoes of the Spanish
chapel at Florence, where Ruskin had pictured the artist himself as
giving his message of religious dogmatic teaching to the world; and
later we shall see how the Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d'Este,
ties down our Pietro most mercilessly in the allegorical painting
which she commissions.

But here, in the rendering at least, Perugino is entirely himself, and
all these figures, whether heroes of heathendom or sages or
prophets--Isaiah, Moses, David, and Daniel--or virtues or lovely
sibyls, are painted in one key of tranquil, devotional beauty.
"Obliged," says Addington Symonds, "to treat in the Sala del Cambio
the representative heroes of Greek and Roman story, he adopted the
manner of his religious paintings. Leonidas, the lion-hearted Spartan,
and Cato, the austere Roman, bend their mild heads like flowers in
Perugino's frescoes, and gather up their drapery in studied folds with
celestial delicacy."

In the ceiling, which, if not painted by himself, is undoubtedly from
his design, he had perhaps a freer hand in the arrangement, and has
created a very lovely piece of decoration. Here the deities of the old
heathen world appear as imaged in that delicious sentiment of the
earlier Renaissance. Venus is wafted through the sky, drawn by two
doves; Luna, nude to the waist, sits in a chariot with her nymphs in
harness; Mercury holds his _caduceus_, the serpent wand; Apollo drives
his four-horsed chariot; and--loveliest group of all--Jupiter receives
the cup of nectar from young Ganymede, "such a cup-bearer" (I wrote in
my Perugian notes) "as the tyrants of the Visconti or the Baglioni may
have had--a slim young page with long floating curls, his limbs clad
in tight red hose, and long ribbons twining around him, as on bent
knee he offers the cup to his master."

His fellow-citizens wished the master to include his own portrait in
the frescoes of their Cambio, and here it is, for us, a square,
solid-looking face of middle life, whose hair escapes from the tight
red cap--a face not perhaps attractive, but of intellectuality and
power, and with great determination in the lines of mouth and chin.
The Latin lines of compliment beneath are probably due to the
scholarly pen of Ma