Perugino's work is well represented in the National Gallery, and its several characteristics are pointed out under the pictures themselves (_cf._ especially 181 and 1075). He was, as we have said, the typical representative of the purist ideal. His technical supremacy set the seal of perfection upon pietistic art, and the masterpiece before us is unique for its combination of warmth of colour, with the expression of religious fervour. "What this artist seems to have aimed at, 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." Of his life as reflected in his work, Ruskin gives this summary: "A sound craftsman and workman to the very heart's core. A noble, gracious, and quiet labourer from youth to death,--never weary, never impatient, never untender, never untrue. Not Tintoret in power, not Raphael in flexibility, not Holbein in veracity, not Luini in love,--their gathered gifts he has, in balanced and fruitful measure, fit to be the guide, and impulse, and father of all" (_Ariadne Florentina_, § 72). But Perugino, like the times in which he lived, presents a study in contradictions. This idealist painted his portrait in the Sala del Cambio; it is an unsurpassed piece of realism, and the hard, unsympathetic features do not belie, but rather win credence for Vasari's tales about his sordid soul. He never deviated in his art from the pietistic path he had chosen; but according to Vasari[135] (whose statements on this point are supported by some other evidence), he was himself an unbeliever, and on his death-bed rejected the last sacraments. In his art he is essentially a quietist. He is not successful when he represents action or movement. His ideal is of quiet rapture, and sacred peace. But the criminal records of Florence prove that he was not over-scrupulous to keep his hands from violence, and in the civil courts he pursued Michael Angelo with equal indiscretion and ill-success for defamation of character. His pictures reflect the landscape, but not the fortunes, of his native country: that the quietism of Perugino "should have been fashionable in Perugia, while the Baglioni were tearing each other to pieces, and the troops of the Vitelli and the Borgia were trampling upon Umbria, is one of the most striking paradoxes of an age rich in dramatic contradictions" (Symonds's _Renaissance_, iii. 218).