y,
and, under the shadow of the Inquisition, religion became a good stone
to throw at your enemy. But we cannot say there is nothing behind his
charge, because, with regret, we have seen within these pages this
master of the tender virgins and calm saints of God as being
vindictive (that affair before the Eight with Aulista di Angelo comes
to our thought), disloyal, and shifty in his business dealings (here
the Orvietans and their Chapel of S. Brizio are an instance), and
always consistently keen on getting the best side of a bargain. It
does come as something of a shock--at any rate to me--to turn from
this serenely devotional art to this record of the man's personality,
and we feel inclined to echo the words of Symonds, who asks, "How
could such a man have endured to pass a long life in the fabrication
of devotional pictures?" The answer perhaps lies in the fact that
Pietro did not create this lovely art of devotion, of which he was
such a supreme interpreter. He found it all around him, in the
aspirations of thousands of prayerful souls, even in the very soil of
this land of his, where the Etruscans had once quarried the tombs of
their dead, and as an art motive it absorbed his whole feeling. When,
later in life, material success came to invade his nature, its
influence as a corrosive at once appears in his art creation. The
touch of ideal beauty leaves his figures; drawing, colour,
composition become mere hasty repetition of his earlier efforts.

And yet we cannot but think of the old master with pleasure, even in
these later years, as filling these little hill-towns of Umbria,
Bettona, Assisi, Montefalco, Spello, Trevi, most of all his own
birthplace, Castello della Pieve, with frescoes which are at least
lovely shadows of his greatest works. At Bettona he had painted a St.
Anthony, and again in the Church of S. Peter at Citta della Pieve, and
here, too, in the Church of S. Maria de' Servi is the fragment--but a
beautiful fragment--of a ruined Crucifixion. The frescoes of S. Maria
Maggiore at Spello (signed and dated 1521), and the Adoration of the
Magi in the Church of S. Maria delle Lagrime at Trevi, are important
in this late period of his art, as well as perhaps a Nativity in the
Church of S. Francesco at Montefalco, which is filled with work of his
pupils. But a work of special interest is his completion of the
frescoes of his greatest pupil, Rafaelle of Urbino, in the Church of
S. Severo at Perugia. Sixteen