ry shortly after this he
left Florence again for Perugia. While here, he received a letter from
the Priors of his birthplace, Citta della Pieve, inviting him to paint
a fresco there. This was on February 20, 1504, and, after some
correspondence as to terms, in March following the contract was
concluded, and the fresco painted in the same year. The subject of
this fine fresco is the Adoration of the Magi. Hidden away in its
little township, it is not easily accessible to visitors, and escaped
the plunder of the French. I have not yet been able to visit it, but
my friend Dr. G. C. Williamson, who drove to Citta across the
mountains from Perugia, was deeply impressed by the painting and the
place, and writes, "The town is strangely beautiful--like a petrified
city, left high and dry by the moving waters of civilisation,
untouched and unspoiled." At Panicale, another township near there, is
a St. Sebastian by our master, signed and dated 1505. These were works
which he probably painted rapidly and for a comparatively low
price--the Pieve Adoration having been reduced to seventy-five
florins--and Crowe and Cavalcaselle trace the hand of his assistant,
Lo Spagna, in the Panicale St. Sebastian and an Assumption in that
city.

But Perugino had by no means abandoned Florence as yet, for we find
him writing from there in June of 1505 to the Marchioness of Mantua to
acknowledge the receipt of eighty ducats for his tempera painting of
the "Combat of Love and Chastity."

Isabella d'Este da Gonzaga, Marchioness of Mantua, an enthusiastic
collector and art patron, and one of the most cultivated women of her
time, was at that moment forming within her palace at Mantua the
famous Studio della Grotta, which she adorned with paintings by
Mantegna, Costa, and Perugino. These paintings, which I have described
in my own work on Mantua, and elsewhere, were still in the Grotta in
1627, but after the terrible sack of Mantua in 1630 they were sold to
Cardinal Richelieu, and are now in the Musee du Louvre. They were all
of allegorical subjects, dictated by the Marchesa herself, and the
"Parnassus" of her court painter, Andrea Mantegna, is a masterpiece.
But that of the Perugian master is far less satisfactory, and was
indeed found so by that very keen critic, the Marchesa Isabella
herself. She wrote to him on June 30 of the year 1505: "The picture
has reached me safely, and, as it is well drawn and coloured, pleases
me; but if it had been more