and
imbecile; and the young Raphael, in disgust, left him and begged the
Lady Giovanna della Rovere for a letter to the Gonfaloniere Soderini,
which should open to him the doors of the Florentine schools. With what
contempt must not Master Perugino have looked after this departing young
Raphael; with what cynical amusement he must have heard how the young
fool, once successful, kept for ever altering his style, wearing his
frail life out, meditating and working himself into the hectic broken
creature whom Marc-Antonio has etched, seated, fagged and emaciated on
the steps before his work. We can imagine how Perugino descanted on all
this folly to the other young men in his workshop. For he was a cynical
man as well as a grasping: he saw no wisdom beyond the desire for money
and comfort. He had begun life almost a beggar, sleeping on a chest,
going without food, in tatters, giving himself no respite from drudgery,
sustained by one idea, one wish!--to be rich. And rich he had become; he
had built houses on speculation at Florence, to let them out; and had
farms at Citta della Pieve, and land near Perugia. He had obtained all
he had ever desired or could conceive desirable: safety from poverty.
In other things he did not believe: not in an after life, nor in God,
nor in good; all these ideas, says Vasari, could never enter into his
porphyry hard brain, "This Peter placed all his hopes in the good things
of fortune, and for money would have made any evil bargain."

This is how Vasari has shown us Perugino. The unique painter of
archangels and seraphs appears a base commercial speculator, a cynic,
an atheist: the sort of man whom you could imagine transfigured into a
shabby pettifogging Faustus, triumphing over the fiend by making over to
him, in return for solid ducats, a bond mortgaging a soul which he knew
himself never to have possessed. Some people may say, as learned folk
are forever saying now-a-days, that all this is pure slander on the part
of Vasari; and indeed, what satisfactory historical villain shall we
soon possess, at the rate of present learned rehabilitations? Be this as
it may, there remains for the present the typical contrast between this
man and his works; and looking at it, other contrasts between noble art
and grovelling artists vaguely occur to us, and we ask ourselves, Can it
be? Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature? Can such
anomaly exist--must the mental product not be stained