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[12] Vermiglioli, App. (3).

[13] Archives of Siena. Vermiglioli, App. xx. and xxi.

“Bernardino Pintoricchio, who now addresses the most respected officials (of the Balia), is the servant of your Lordships, and not the least among renowned painters; for whom, as Cicero has written, the Romans in early times held but little. Yet after the increase of the empire, and in consequence of Eastern victories and the conquest of the Greek cities, they called the best from all parts of the world, not hesitating to seize all the finest pictures and sculptures which they could discover. They admitted painting to be supreme, similar to the liberal arts, and a rival to poesy. And artists being usually esteemed by those who govern republics, the said Bernardino has elected Sienna to be his home, hoping to live and reside there; (therefore) confiding in the clemency of your Lordships, and considering the adverse nature of the times, the smallness and diminution of profits, and the weight of his family; having heard also that craftsmen taking up their abode here receive grants of immunities, he prays exemption for thirty years from all taxes whatever, whether present or to come.”[14]

[14] Doc. Sen. iii. 33–4. Trans. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. iii. p. 285.

In the spring of 1508 he was back across Italy to little Spello, where, in the transept of Sant’ Andrea, he left an altar-painting, a Madonna and Saints, which does not add materially to his reputation. On a little stool in the foreground of the picture is painted a letter of Cardinal Baglioni, dated April 8th, 1508, written from his castle of Rocca di Zocco, full of affectionate assurances, and asking the painter to return to Siena. Its inclusion has been imputed to Pintoricchio’s vanity; but a man who had been friends with Popes, and who had long been courted on all sides, was hardly likely to be uplifted by the friendship of a simple Cardinal-bishop. It is more likely that he was bitten with a rather inartistic fancy for painting objects lying about, to deceive the eye, and hit upon this as an appropriate one.

He now paid his last visit to Rome: Pope Julius II. had summoned him, together with Perugino, Signorelli, and others, to consider the decoration of the Vatican rooms. Giambattista Caporali, the historian, speaks of a supper at which they were all present at the house of Bramante. Their host was the man who had introduced young Raphael to the Pope, and Pintoricchio, among the rest, had the mortification of seeing himself superseded in the city where he had been foremost a few years earlier. He and Signorelli returned to Siena together, and the master of Cortona stood sponsor to the child born in January 1509. In October, Pintoricchio had sold a house in the third ward of the city to Pandolfo Petrucci for 420 florins. He was in close contact at this time with that great merchant prince, and was employed with Signorelli on Petrucci’s new palace, where he painted the frescoes, of which one, the “Return of Ulysses,” in the National Gallery, is all that remains. We find him buying land in Siena and selling it in Perugia, making his will, and arranging his affairs. In the last year of his life he painted that brilliant and tender little picture of “Christ bearing the Cross,” now in the Borromeo Palace at Milan. He was suspicious and unhappy about his wife’s behaviour, and a fresh will was made, to which a codicil was added in September and another in October. In the first he deprived her of some of the money he had already left her, but he returned it in the last addition.

Vasari’s story of the cause of his death, which took place December 11th, 1513, can be nothing but a fable. He tells us that Pintoricchio was executing some work for the Fathers of San Francesco, and being hampered by a heavy bureau in the room assigned to him, insisted on having it moved. In the transit it broke open, and a treasure of gold was discovered in the secret drawer, so much to the chagrin of the painter that he never held up his head again. The friends who knew the painter in Siena do not allude to any such occurrence; and the popular master, entrusted with more commissions than he could execute, well paid and honoured by all men, was not likely to be upset by the sight of some gold coins, even if he could persuade himself that he had any right to them. The real circumstances of his death were sadder, if less sensational. Sigismondo Tizio, a Sienese historian, writer of a mass of almost unedited matter, who was his attached friend and his neighbour in the parish of San Vincenzo and Sant’ Anastasia, has left a record of his last illness, in which he accuses his wife Grania of causing his death by her neglect. Tizio says that she went about with her lover, Girolamo di Paolo, nicknamed il Paffo, a soldier of the Piazza at Siena, and that Bernardino was shut up and left to die of starvation; that some women heard his cries and went to his assistance, and that it was from them that Tizio afterwards learned these particulars. From Tizio’s way of describing it he seems to accuse her of a deliberate attempt to starve her husband; but as no proceedings were ever taken against her, and she succeeded in peace to her inheritance, we may gather that she was not guilty of actually criminal conduct, though her neglect was sufficient to hasten the death of a man attacked by serious illness and needing careful nursing. Bernardino Betti lies buried in the Parish Church of San Vincenzo, joining the Oratory of the Contrade of the Ostrich. In 1830 the Abbé de Angelis put up a plate with an inscription to his memory. Mariotti speaks of a Giovanni di Pintoricchio who was a canon of the Cathedral of Perugia in 1525; but Pintoricchio’s own sons would have then been too young to hold such a post, and we hear nothing in later years of his descendants.

After his death Grania lived on in Siena, and two years after, as his executor and trustee, sold two lots of land to one of the Chigi for 1677 florins. Again, in the following year, she sought permission to sell the land which was the portion of her daughter Faustina, and she makes a will which is dated May 22nd, 1518. The man who was said to be her lover afterwards married her daughter Egidia.

We possess several portraits of Pintoricchio from his own hand; all are sufficiently like one another, though painted at different periods of his life, to assure us that they were like the original. The first is in the fresco of the “Argument of St. Catherine,” in the Borgia Apartments. The painter at this time must have been about thirty-nine years old. His portrait certainly looks much younger; but he was a thin, dark man who very possibly looked less than his years, or he may have purposely represented himself so, as we notice this in other portraits. The face is an interesting and sensitive one, with speaking eyes and a melancholy expression. In the striking head which he has signed and placed as a picture on the walls of the Virgin’s chamber in the chapel of the Baglioni at Spello, the face has sharpened and aged considerably, though it still looks young for a man of fifty-two. The lines have deepened, the mouth is compressed, and the face wears a look of ill-health, almost of suffering. It has the dark, arched brows of the artist, and clever, observant eyes which look out at us, sideways, tending to give a suspicious look, though probably it was only that he saw himself so in a mirror. Again, he stands in the row of portraits in the fresco of the “Canonisation of St. Catherine,” in the Library at Siena. This face, too, has an expression of bitterness and melancholy—pinched lips, and sad, regretful eyes.[15] The self-conscious expression of all leads us to suspect that his was a self-tormenting, morbid nature, such as the artistic temperament and keen sense of beauty might well have combined with a sickly body to produce. In the eyes, too, it is easy to read that fantastic touch which came out in his love for story and for the grotesque, and perhaps there is something of that aloofness which the deafness, which led to his nickname, so often gives.

[15] In the group of Apostles in the “Assumption” at Naples is one, the fifth on the left, which he is said to have meant for himself, but it is less characteristic than those already noticed.

That he was a lovable man is, I think, evident. We hear of no quarrels with his fellow-artists; Perugino secured him some of the best positions in the Sixtine, Signorelli was his child’s sponsor. He had clearly the art of managing his assistants, who everywhere worked intelligently under him. With Fiorenzo his artistic relations must have been of the closest. Pope Alexander valued him, and Cæsar’s mention is an affectionate one, while the letter of Cardinal Baglioni is full of friendliness. Besides this, few things are more interesting in the history of artists’ friendships than the close confidence and affection which all study of the frescoes at Siena convinces us existed between him and the young Raphael. Sigismondo Tizio, in his MS., gives his opinion that Bernardino surpassed Perugino as a painter, but that he had less sense and prudence than Vannucci, and was given to empty chatter.

A small number of Pintoricchio’s works cannot be dated, and we must be satisfied with mentioning them, and considering the times at which they might have been produced.

His name is written variously in the documents of the time. In the grants of land signed by Cardinal Camerlengo, it is Pentoricchio, and Pentorichio on the fresco of Geometry in the Borgia rooms. Cardinal Baglioni writes it Pintorichio. In Grania’s petition it appears as Pinturicchio. He himself signs his last picture, the “Cross-bearing Christ” in the Palazzo Borromeo, Pintoricchio, and to this form I have adhered. In the documents he is usually styled Messer Bernardino.