If we compare this picture with Pintoricchio's "Nativity" in
San Girolamo's Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, we see at a
glance the resemblance that underlies a few superficial variations. The
whole construction of the two groups is similar. The Madonna's bent
head, elbows squared, joined palms and finger-tips, the Child, lying
partly on His Mother's robe, the position of the grey-bearded St. Joseph
and the shepherds--everywhere Pintoricchio has been guided by the
earlier master, though instead of the donor and two young men, who may
have been his sons, and who kneel with their great hound behind them, he
has substituted St. Jerome and his lion, and shepherds of a more
acceptedly religious type, while the group of singing angels overhead is
transferred from Fiorenzo's panel to that other Nativity at Spello.
Over the door of the Sala del Censo in the Palazzo Pubblico at Perugia,
is a lunette of a Madonna and Child by Fiorenzo, which might well be
Pintoricchio's own. It has his full touch and copious brush. We find the
Mother again in the exquisite little fresco over the door of the Hall of
Arts and Sciences in the Borgia Apartments, transplanted almost without
alteration of line or expression; while the two angels on either side
are those which he uses to support the dead Christ in the Pietà at the
top of the polyptych painted for Santa Maria dei Fossi.
We have no trace of Pintoricchio himself ever having visited Florence,
but the water flowed to him none the less from the fountainhead, and he
assimilated it in his own manner. Fiorenzo, we feel sure, must have been
there, and that in those years when Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo approached
most nearly to one another; and it was Fiorenzo, and not Perugino, who
was the channel through which Florentine influence filtered to
Pintoricchio. We recognise Verrocchio in the wide and swollen nostrils,
the broad head, the hooking of the little finger, and the treatment of
the hair which Fiorenzo adopts; while we perceive that Pollaiuolo has
aroused a wish to show more animated action. From Pollaiuolo, too, comes
the careful handling of brocaded stuffs, the little, crab-like,
clutching hands, the delight in using the costume of the day in all its
fantastic picturesqueness. Even more striking is the architectural
influence which Fiorenzo conveyed to Pintoricchio. The masters of Umbria
became singularly alive to the charm of airy architectural space, and
such classic settings as we may date from Brunelleschi's visit to Rome
in 1403, and more especially attribute in their working out, to the
high, imaginative faculty and Greek spirit of Leo Battista Alberti,
whose spacious arcades are often used merely as decoration. At Urbino,
in the court of the Ducal Palace, the Umbrians had one example of the
highest interest: here was the taste which Lauranna drew from the
Florentines, and which passed onwards to Bramante. Piero della Francesca
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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