The _Combat of Love and Chastity_ (No. 1567) was commissioned by
Isabella d’Este, Duchess of Mantua, in 1505, and removed at the sack
of that city in 1630 to the Château of Richelieu, where it remained
down to the Revolution. The _St. Paul_ (No. 1566) is a very late and
not very attractive work. In his best pictures Perugino loved to paint
a purist landscape with its buoyant spaciousness of view, but too
frequently his figures are insufficiently dramatic and have a tendency
towards sentimentality. A very late _St. Sebastian_ (No. 1668A),
which is on a much smaller scale than the subject of our illustration
(Plate VI.), is officially catalogued as being by an Unknown Umbrian
painter. The _Apollo and Marsyas_ (No. 1509), which was purchased at
Christie’s in 1850 for £70 by Morris Moore, with an ascription to
Mantegna, was in 1883 sold to the Louvre for £8000. It long hung in
the Salon Carré as a Raphael, but is now only attributed to him by the
cataloguer. This gem of Umbrian art has successively been ascribed by
critics to Pintoricchio, Timoteo Viti, Francesco Francia, and others,
but is to-day generally regarded as a very fine example of the art of
Perugino. Two pictures (No. 1573 and No. 1573A) of the _Madonna and
Child_ are by unidentifiable pupils of Perugino.
One of the most recent acquisitions is a _Madonna_ by Antoniazzo
Romano (1440?-1508), the gift of M. Lucien Delamarre. The art of
Pintoricchio (1454-1513) is shown in the _Madonna and Child with St.
Gregory and another Saint_ (No. 1417), while Lo Spagna (1475?-1528?),
a pupil of Perugino, is represented by a _Nativity_ (No. 1539),
a _Madonna and Child_ (No. 1540), and by three small pictures
illustrating the _Dead Christ, the Virgin, and St. John_ (No. 1568),
_St. Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata_ (No. 1569), and _St.
Jerome in the Desert_ (No. 1570).
A mediocre pupil of Perugino and Pintoricchio, Giannicola Manni (fl.
1493-1544), is doubtless responsible for the _Baptism of Christ_ (No.
1369), the _Assumption_ (No. 1370), the _Adoration of the Magi_ (No.
1371), and the _Holy Family_ (1372) which pass under his name. The
last-mentioned panel was attributed by Villot, apparently without much
reason, to L’Ingegno.