HOW tion of sex; the
TO STUDY PICTURES embodiment, with as
httle bodily hinin the beatitude of
drance as possible, of a soul engaged contemplation. His figures, then, do not represent Virgin, saints, and angels as such, but as personifications of intense soul-rapture. They are the souls and soul-
saturated bodies which Perugino saw around him. For in the dying years of the fifteenth century Italy was torn with factions, a prey to sack and massacre at the
hands of licentious bands of soldiers. Perugia itself, the little town on the hills of Umbria, where Perugino worked, was governed by treacherous and ferocious captains its dark and precij^itous streets were filled with broil and bloodshed, and its palaces with evil living. Yet it was one of the most pious cities in all Italy. JNIen and ;
women
sought refuge from the horrors of actual
life in
strange spiritual solitude, in life removed from all activities, steeped in devotion, passively contemplating a f ar-oif ideal of purity
and
loveliness.
This was a very different thing from the active religious feeling of Fra Angelico simple and childlike in :
faith; a product, as it were, of the open daythe lovable expression of a man who, as we have light; seen, entered humbly and intelligently into the activities its
sunny
around him. had its roots
Fra Angelico's, tradition of painting. Byzantine that the latter had departed farther and
Yet Perugino's
art, like
in the old
You remember
from any actual representation of the human form, until it became merely a symbol of religious ideas. Perugino, working under the influence of his time, restored body and substance to the figures, but still made of an ideal. In them, as of old, primarily the symbols ^ farther
[
70
]