[Illustration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
In "The Visitation," which fills the remaining space on this side, we have one of those sweet, home-like narrative paintings so dear to Umbrian art. The Virgin and St. Elizabeth, dressed in the long conventional blue and green draperies, clasp hands in the foreground, the Virgin with downcast eyes, the saint with the searching gaze prescribed by tradition. Behind them, St. Joseph leans on a staff, and a procession of children and pages follows: a girl with graceful swathings of scarf and sleeve carries a basket of fruit upon her head, and with a child at her feet, is distantly reminiscent of certain figures by Botticelli in the Sixtine Chapel. The smiling landscape, across which the visitors have journeyed, is seen through a perspective of elaborately drawn and decorated arches, on which some of those drawings of grotesque ornamentation can be discerned. On the right, in the shadows of the arcades, is a delightful group, one of those bits with which Pintoricchio gives interest and charm to his compositions. Zacharias, who is as yet unaware of the arrival, leans in an angle, absorbed in a book. On the ground a group of women, young and old, are occupied in spinning and embroidery; at the back another graceful figure twirls a distaff, and a child plays with a dog on the ground in front. In some of the secondary parts of the execution of this, Schmarsow sees the hand of Pintoricchio's best scholar. The architecture has nothing of the Umbrian style, but shows the hand of one to whom the Lombard decoration, with its terra-cotta work, is familiar. The whole of the fresco is more broadly painted, the draperies in large, broad folds, the value of the landscape better kept, more softly modulated than in any we have yet noticed.
[Illustration: _Anderson photo_] [_Borgia Apartments, Vatican, Rome_
THE DEMON WOMEN (Detail from the fresco of "St. Anthony and St. Paul")]
The light over the windows is so bad that it is almost impossible to get an adequate view of the frescoes placed there. This is particularly unfortunate in the Hall of Saints, for no one of the scenes is more beautiful, more happily grouped or more full of interest than the one of St. Sebastian's martyrdom. The young Saint who, transfixed with arrows and bound with cords, stands at the base of a column placed against a mass of ruined brickwork on Mount Palatine, is a pathetic figure, full of calm dignity and resignation. It is drawn and modelled with care and freedom, and has a force and solidity which make us regret that Pintoricchio did not give himself more chance by oftener painting studies from the nude. The figure and drapery with some modifications seem to have been adapted from his fresco of the "Baptism of Christ," but he has learnt more since then, and it stands firmer and gives a greater sense of elasticity and poise. The groups of archers on either hand, shooting at their human mark, under the superintendence of a Janissary in Eastern dress,[25] are full of movement and variety. One draws his bow, another is putting the arrow in the string, another has just let fly, while behind him a fourth in half armour shades his eyes with his hand and watches the weapon speed to the mark--a quaint, matter-of-fact rendering of a scene of tragedy, which deprives it of its serious character and gives it, as Steinmann remarks, a social air, as of a friendly shooting match.
