It would be impossible to close any account of the school of Perugino
without a slight sketch of the two Alfanis whose intense admiration for
the genius of painting became a fault, and who, through their very
earnestness preserved the corpse from which the life long since had
fled. The Alfanis, Domenico the father, and Orazio the son, had money
and long life. These two happy gifts they employed in the paths of art;
with these two gifts they at length degraded what they really attempted
to exalt. Domenico was such a passionate admirer of Raphael that one of
his historians declared him to have died in the same year as Sanzio.
Mariotti denies this. "However passionate a friend and inseparable a
companion," he urges, "Domenico had not for certain such a crazy folly
as to accompany him to the other world." Domenico far outlived Raphael.
In his long life he absorbed the teaching of many schools, and utterly
obliterated his own personality in the work of other people. His son
Orazio did the same. They went into partnership, started a large school
or studio, and there created the innumerable, rather middle-class
pictures, which cover the walls of the Pinacoteca. Grazio survived his
father about thirty years, and was the first president of the Academy of
Perugia founded in 1573.
* * * * *
One word to close these notes about the painters of the Umbrian school.
Seek out the painters in the places where they painted. Go to Spoleto
for the works of Lo Spagna, to Gubbio for the masterpiece of Nelli, to
Spello for Pinturicchio, to Foligno for the early men who have not even
names. Go in May to Montefalco, when all the green of Umbrian angels'
wings is in the lanes which lead to these. Learn by heart the Umbrian
landscape if you wish to really love and understand the spirit of
Umbrian art. The Pinacoteca of Perugia serves only as a backbone for the
genuine study.[103]
CHAPTER XI
_The Museum,[104] and Tomb of the Volumnii_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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