We have no means of deciding what was the first important commission the young painter undertook after he left the Sixtine Chapel. The German critics, however, agree in placing the Buffalini Chapel in Ara Cœli as his next work. Morelli thinks it was later on account of the decoration of "grottesques," but it has a simplicity and absence of ornament more akin to the Sixtine work than to Pintoricchio's later gorgeous achievements, and he uses much of the same soft grey colour. It is not unlikely that he would have brought a special commendation from the Buffalini of Perugia to those members settled in Rome, and it is easy to see how fresh in his mind were the architectural traditions of Fiorenzo. The chapel, being painted almost entirely by his own hand, looks as if he had not yet gathered together so many assistants, and a little later, loaded with papal commissions, he would hardly have had time to devote to a private citizen. It seems to me that we have scarcely any work of his for which we can feel such unalloyed admiration as that in this little chapel in the dim old church upon the Capitoline Hill, where from the midst of classic marbles and pre-historic legends, you pass into the quiet side aisle, and the level rays of the golden evening sunshine that pour through a little west window, light up the story of the mediæval saint as illustrated by his Umbrian name-child. Hardly any saint could have been more dear and familiar to the sons of mid-Italy than San Bernardino of Siena, the disciple of their beloved St. Francis, and one who had exercised such a strong and recent influence over his followers. He died only nine years before Pintoricchio was born, and as he grew up the little Bernardino must have heard ardent references to his holy patron from men who had crowded round the pulpit outside the cathedral in Perugia. His gonfalon, painted by Bonfigli, hung in the Church of San Bernardino. His thin face, with its pinched mouth, was familiar to every one, and stories of his wisdom, his virtue, his miracles, were fresh on men's lips. Pintoricchio must have been well acquainted with the history of the saint's amicable arrangement of a deadly feud which had raged between the Buffalini and the fierce Baglioni of his native town, and both as a _protégé_ of San Bernardino and as a Perugian, the commission to paint a chapel in honour of the saint and to commemorate the healing of the quarrel must have made a special appeal to his quick and sensitive fancy. The chapel was probably the gift of Lodovico Buffalini, advocate to the papal consistory, who, we find from an inscription on a stone in the pavement, died in 1506. The painting was for many years almost concealed by a hideous wooden hatchment, and only re-opened again in the last century, which accounts for the excellent preservation it is in.