Vatican and Araceli Temple possess some of his works; at Siena he
painted, in ten pictures, the history of Pio II. and added one of Pio
III. his employer, and these, with what he left in the Dome of Spello,
are the best of his labours.
Of at more independent and grander spirit was Andrea Luigi, of Assisi,
surnamed L'Ingegno, the Genius. He assisted Pietro in the Change-hall
at Perugia, and there and in his Prophets and Sibyls at Assisi,
aggrandized and mellowed the style of his master to a degree, which led
Sandrart, with others, to ascribe the latter work to Raphael; but
blindness checked his career in the bloom of life, and left the art to
Raphael without a rival.
Domenico di Paris Alfani added, likewise, some improvements to the style
of Pietro. His name was nearly sunk in that of his son or brother
Orazio, and time and dates alone have re-asserted its right to some
excellent works long adjudged to the other; and which, were it not for
an insipid sweetness of tone bordering on that of Baroccio, seem to have
been inspired by the principles of Raphael.
Of Pietro's many ultramontane pupils, Giovanni Spagnuolo, a Spaniard,
called Lo Spagna, who settled at Spoleto, is considered by Vasari as the
most eminent. But all these names united confer less celebrity on
Pietro, than the felicity of having reared the powers of Raffaello
Sanzio, if not the founder, the great establisher of the Roman School.
Raffaello Sanzio, born at Urbino on Holy Friday, April 1483, was the son
of Giovanni Sanzio, named among the contemporaries and occasional
helpers of Pietro, in whose school, after having imparted the first
rudiments of Art to his son, conscious of his own inferiority, he had
the modesty to place him. Here his progress was so rapid that he soon
rendered himself completely master of Vannucci's style, soon became his
favourite pupil, soon his co-adjutor, and in a short period more than
his competitor: for though the pictures which he painted at Cività di
Castello and Perugia, and are so amorously dwelt on by Lanzi, still
betray in composition, design, and colour, the principles of the master,
they exhibit symptoms of that expression, that beauty, those simple
graces, that refinement and precision of finish, which not only had
remained unknown to Pietro, but in their purity were never attained by
any subsequent artist.--Some of these are perceivable already, if
scantily, in the Procession to Golgotha, preceded by horsemen and
attended by the Madonna and her female train; and still less perceptibly
in one of its predelle which exhibits the Saviour held extended by his
Mother, Magdalen and John: they cannot be mistaken in the predelle
which represents him among the sleeping disciples praying in the
garden,--performances of his puerility, and most probably before he left
the school of Pietro.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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