We have seen in the Sistine Chapel a mechanical and rather perfunctory symmetry, various clever evasions of an idyllic sort, and a picturesque disorder side by side. The most ambitious decorative scheme of the time seems to result in a kind of artistic bankruptcy. But fortunately the Sistine Chapel contains its own self-criticism and remedy, in the extraordinary fresco by Pietro Perugino, Christ delivering the Keys to Peter, Figure 118. Perugino is an Umbrian from Città della Pieve, thirty-five years old, and with a certain amount of Florentine training. He has, like Masaccio sixty years before, looked at the art of his times and found it wanting. He has had the lucidity to see that the malady is surplusage and disorder. Hence, he argues, the remedy is simplicity and order. To this he adds a sense of vastness. In this picture the temple platform, a vastness made by man, is set within the vastness of a river valley made by nature. The foreground group is arranged in a formal half military order which is cunningly made easy and flexible by differences of posture and gesture. Every tilted head and pointed foot has its reason. Without undue insistence, all the apostles are interested in the rite which ordains their chief. Here is no casual pleasure ground in which you may delightfully look about, here is a definite vision of a momentous act which you must see swiftly, completely, and precisely as the artist intends you shall see. It is the only well-considered design among these frescoes. It points the simplest and surest way by which the exuberance of the Early Renaissance might be disciplined into a noble order, and within twenty years the lesson was to be reread for all Italy by young Raphael of Urbino. Meanwhile the somewhat irresponsible exuberance of the new narrative painting has after all its winning aspect, is a sign of an energy and enthusiasm that need not so much to be tamed as to be intellectualized. In discussing the last twenty years of the fifteenth century in Florence I am embarrassed by the richness of the field. Beside such typical figures as Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, we have to do with such sensitive and morbid spirits as Filippino Lippo and Piero di Cosimo; with Andrea Verrocchio and a group of imitators of his fastidious manner, notable among them young Leonardo da Vinci; with a host of secondary painters, particularly of furniture panels, and small altar-pieces, while if we consider rather artistic training than accident of birth, we must reckon with the Florentine achievement the rugged triumphs of Luca Signorelli. But since the more distinctive and progressive of these artists are really precursors of the Golden Age, or symptomatic of the unrest that was its prelude, they may best be treated later. That will leave us only the painters who are fully representative of the festal moment of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s greatness—the furniture painters and Ghirlandaio.