asari's Lives," has here overthrown the statement by Vasari that
"Pietro, having come to the age of seventy-two years, ended the course
of his life in Castello della Pieve, where he was honourably buried in
the year 1524." We know now that his sons (1524) endeavoured to have
their father's body brought from his hasty burial-place to be interred
in S. Agostino at Perugia; but, in the disturbed state of central
Italy during this epoch of foreign invasion, the pious wish was never
fulfilled.

When we think with what care and expense Pietro had once prepared his
last resting-place in S. Maria de' Servi at Florence, this tragedy of
his unknown and hurried burial seems the more sad. He survives in his
art; and that is a complete vindication, an undying memorial. In these
pages we have traced his progress from his first great commission of
the Sistine Chapel, with its dignified grouping and sense of air and
space, through the tender beauty of his altar-pieces, the simplicity
and breadth of his fresco work--the Nativity of the Villa Albani, the
Crucifixion of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, the Pieta of the nuns of
S. Chiara, the altar-piece of the Certosa of Pavia--till, in his great
decorative commission at Perugia of the Sala del Cambio, in the year
1500, he seemed to reach the summit of his creative power, and climb
down from thence, though by no means immediately or conclusively, to
these faded and yet exquisite frescoes, with which, in his own fading
years, he wreathed the little hill-cities of his native Umbria. And we
noted him as a complete master of his art, even though he might
willingly abide within a certain religious convention; we saw that the
master of the Delivery of the Keys within the Sistine, the great
portrait artist, whose hand has left us those forceful heads of
Francesco delle Opere, of the Abbot Baldasarre, and Don Biagio, the
painter of the Albani and Certosa altar-pieces, the decorator of the
Cambio, had nothing to fear in his powers of art creation from the
very greatest of his time.

But after we have said all this, we must own that his special place
within that galaxy of genius of the greatest Italian art is best
described by a writer to whose appreciative criticism I have always
given my sincere admiration; for Pietro's task it was "to create for
the soul amid the pomps and passions of this world a resting-place of
contemplation, tenanted by saintly and seraphic beings. No pain comes
near the folk