years had elapsed since Rafaelle in 1505
had, as a youth of brilliant promise, painted the upper fresco,
anticipating therein the composition of his great Disputa del
Sacramento within the Vatican. Since then he had gone on from strength
to strength, and now, in his declining years, his old master was
called on to complete his pupil's work. The six saints whom he painted
there, beneath Rafaelle's fresco, grouped on either side of
terra-cotta figures of the Virgin and Child--SS. Jerome, John,
Gregory, and Boniface, with SS. Scolastica and Martha--possess, as far
as can be now judged, both dignity and beauty. The fresco is signed by
him, and dated with the year of 1521, little more than a year before
his death.

For to the last the old man was busy, and after a long life of
industry died almost with the brush within his hand. This very year of
1521 he was at Trevi as well as Spello. In 1522 he painted the
"Transfiguration" for S. Maria Nuova at Perugia, and his frescoes for
the Convent of S. Agnese at Perugia, which are still in place--both
the "Transfiguration" and its three predella panels being now in the
Perugian Gallery. His last work (1523), the fresco of the Adoration of
the Shepherds (a fresco now transferred to canvas), is now in the
London National Gallery, where is also his charming Virgin with the
little Jesus and St. John, a signed work from the late Mr. Beckford's
collection. The child Jesus stands, naked and upright, upon a stone
balustrade, and plays with a lock of His mother's hair, who is herself
of the pure virginal type imaged by Rafaelle in his earlier creations,
notably the famous "Madonna del Granduca"; while the "Adoration," the
master's last work, was removed from the Church of Fontignano in 1843.
The landscape in both these works--in the Beckford Virgin blue hills
and outlined trees, in the Fontignano fresco wide-sweeping uplands--is
of great attraction.

"As the aged artist," says Crowe, "laboured at Fontignano, industrious
to the close, a plague broke out in the Perugia district and ravaged
the country. A disgraceful panic over-spread the land. It was decreed
that the ceremonies of religion should be omitted in all cases where
death ensued from the contagion. Perugino died and was buried in a
field at Fontignano ... and no one knows where lie the bones of Pietro
Perugino." Later documentary evidence, which is quoted by the above
authors, and at greater length by Milanesi in his edition of
"V