_Bernardino Fungai_ (Sienese: about 1460-1516).
"In flatness, absence of chiaroscuro, and use of gilding, he
partakes of the Sienese School," resembling, for instance,
Matteo di Giovanni (1155). "But he is rather pleasing in his
children and angels, where he is influenced by Perugino; also
in his landscapes, which, though peculiar in their faint blue
distance, recall Pinturicchio. A characteristic of the master
is the heaviness of his hands at the fingers' ends" (Layard's
edition of "Kugler," i. 205). Fungai may best be studied in the
Accademia of Siena.
The style of this painter is dismissed by Lanzi as "dry," and by
another authority as "dry and stiff." There is a certain stiffness,
undoubtedly--due probably in part to religious symbolism--in the hands
of the Virgin and in the upraised finger of the Child, and in those of
the otherwise human and chubby cherubim. But there is nothing dry or
stiff in the pretty faces of these children, or in the gracious and
beautiful face of the mother. She is clad in a white-and-gold brocade
of very beautiful pattern. "One of the finest of the kind known to us,
it appears," says the _Athenæum_, "to be of Venetian origin, and is a
pure and perfect diaper, instinct with the choicest Gothic grace and
harmony of line, and betraying but the slightest touch of Orientalism.
This circumstance attests that the brocade did not come from a Sicilian
loom, while other elements prohibit us from ascribing it to an
ultramontane craftsman." The landscape background, which has sadly
darkened, has many quaint figures--on one side Mary, Joseph, and a cow;
on the other, the Three Kings and their attendants.