S. Martino is so old, and so much overshadowed by the big palace opposite, it is sunk so low upon the street, that passing by it hurriedly one scarcely recognises it as a church at all.[84] The high altar has a very beautiful altar-piece by Giannicola Manni--one of the loveliest bits of Umbrian colouring that we remember in Perugia, and there is a rather faulty fresco by some scholar of Perugino on the west wall, redeemed by that subtle and sweet charm peculiar to the work of the master. The little church is guarded by a true friend, who not only honours its pictures, but has even copied them with faithful care, and the whole place is filled with something of the quiet and religious fervour which lingers only after centuries of prayer and incense, and which is lacking in so many of the more frequented churches of the town. CHAPTER IX _Pietro Perugino and the Cambio_[85] The name of Perugia is naturally connected with that of Pietro Vannucci _detto il Perugino_, or, as he preferred to sign himself, _Petrus de Castro Plebis_, who stamped the peculiar personality of his painting upon a whole school of Renaissance Italian art. Vannucci was by no means the first artist of the Umbrian school, but he was the man who brought it into general notice, and it was in the city of Perugia that he lived and worked, and had his school of painting. The best of Perugino's work, however, with the exception of his frescoes in the Cambio, is not to be found in his native town. The indefatigable Napoleon had a profound admiration for Pietro's altar-pieces. He sought them out, he insisted on getting every inch of them, down to their smallest predellas, and the splendid pictures of S. Pietro, S. Lorenzo, and S. Agostino went over the Alps to swell his galleries in the Tuileries. The frescoes of the Cambio could not go, and they at least remain exactly as the master painted them. To understand the man Pietro as well as the artist, we must study in the Cambio, for there his portrait hangs face to face with a whole set of his frescoes, and the contrast of the painter's face and the faces he invariably gave to his saints is almost as strange as that between the Umbrian saints and the history of the times in which they lived and worked.