. Such is this isolated Tiber valley, whose skies and whose
legends are so perfectly in harmony, and in it was born, of the country
and of the traditions, a special, isolated school of art.

Is it a school or a man?--A school concentrated in one man, or a man
radiating into a school. There are a great many men all about the one
man Perugino, masters or pupils; the first seem so many bungled attempts
to be what he is, the second so many disintegrations of him. Even the
more powerful individualities are lost in his presence; at Perugia we
know nothing of the real Pinturicchio, the bright, vain, thoughtless
painters of the pageant scenes, brilliant like pages of Boiardo's fairy
tales, on the walls of the Sienese Library. Raphael is no separate
individual, has no personal qualities before he leaves Perugia.
Everything is Perugino, in more or less degree. The whole town, nay, the
surrounding country, is one vast studio in which his themes are being
developed, his works being copied, his tricks being imitated. A score of
artists of talent, one or two like Lo Spagna and the young Raphael, of
first-rate powers, and a host of mere mechanical drudges, give us, in
all Perugia, nothing new, nothing individual, no impression which we can
disentangle from the general, all-pervading impression given by the one
man Perugino. The country, physical and moral, has exhausted itself
in this one artistic manifestation. One not merely, but unique and
one-sided. What Perugino has done has been done by no other master; and
what Perugino has done is only one thing, and that to all eternity. The
sense of complete absence of variety, of difference; the impression of
all being reduced to the minimum of everything, the vague consciousness
that all here is one, isolated and indivisible, which haunts us all
through the churches and galleries of Perugia, pursues us likewise
through all the works of the school, that is to say, of Perugino
himself. This unique school, consisting in reality of a single man,
possesses only one theme, one type, one idea, one feeling; it does,
it attempts but one thing, and that one thing means isolation,
concentration, elimination of all but one single mood.

It is the painting of solitude; of the isolated soul, alone, unaffected
by any other, unlinked in any work, or feeling, or suffering, with any
other soul, nay even with any physical thing. The men and women of
Perugino are the most completely alone that any artist ever