Pintoricchio's last frescoes were three, painted for the palace of Pandolfo Petrucci, in succession to a series nearly completed by Signorelli and Girolamo Genga. They represented classical subjects, and of them there only remains "The Return of Ulysses," in the National Gallery. The fresco painting in this is rough and slight, the figures have little modelling, but are almost like patterns upon the background, the limbs of the suitors are unstructural even for Pintoricchio, yet the whole effect is charming. The head of the principal suitor is fine and expressive, and is very probably a portrait from life--perhaps one of the sons of the house. Penelope, bending over her web, is natural and life-like--a careful study of a girl in the costume of the day. The scene is drawn in clever perspective, and there is much conscious humour in the accessories; the cat playing with a ball; the sirens grasping their two tails in their hands, as they warble round the galley, to the mast of which Ulysses is bound; the young man in another boat diving headlong into the water, unable to resist their fascination; and the island where the wanderer is interviewing Circe and her swine. Here Pintoricchio is once more fresh and unconventional, fertile in fancy. The bold manner in which the lines of the loom are placed right across the picture is as daring as it is successful. The attitudes and relations of the figures are full of originality, and the uncompromising square of the window lets a flood of light and space into the foreground, so full of action and movement.
[Illustration: _Hanfstängl photo_] [_National Gallery, London_
Dr. Steinmann suggests, with great probability, that we may fix March as the month of Pintoricchio's return to Siena in 1506, for in that month he took into his employ the Perugian painter, Eusebio di San Giorgio. This, no doubt, marks a fresh start, and the master now worked steadily on until the Library was completed.
There is little that is devotional in character about the Libreria in Siena. As the visitor passes the bronze doors, past the marble columns of pagan sculpture and Renaissance copy, he loses all sense of being in part of a sacred building. The chamber itself is singularly destitute of the ordinary objects of religious art. No Divine Persons, no evangelists, saints, or fathers--not an angel in the whole range of subjects. We have here one of those examples of historic fresco which were a feature common to fifteenth-century art, a popular way of decorating the living-halls of great seigneurs, such as the Palaces at Urbino and Mantua, or the Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara.