In the "Assumption," which fills the opposite wall, the figures are too ill drawn to allow us to think they can be Pintoricchio's. The arms are too short, the feet out of drawing, the figure of the Madonna is unnaturally long, with sloping shoulders. Crowe and Cavalcaselle were the first to suggest as its author Matteo Balducci, a painter who has left several panels at Siena, which were for long assigned to Pintoricchio, under whom he worked in Rome. The "Virgin and Child, with Saints" over the altar is a very inferior work, entirely repainted. Round the top of the wall runs a series of scenes from the life of the Virgin. These have been attributed to the North Italian, Morto da Feltre. They are certainly not by Pintoricchio.
There remains, then, only the little chapel of St. Jerome, which, in spite of some restoration and some destruction, we can attribute to the master. It has the freshness of early work, and both in colouring and style is akin to that of San Bernardino in Ara Cœli, while the influence of Fiorenzo has re-asserted itself. Over the altar is the "Nativity," which bears so close a resemblance to the older master's "Adoration" at Perugia. In the finished sketch at Venice, for the tender figure of the Madonna, the drapery has the stair-like gradations of folds on both sides, which Morelli points out as characteristic of him, and the same critic draws attention to the type of hand, with long, bony fingers, that we find in his later Madonna dei Fossi. The landscape, which is soft and deep in tone, resembles that of the frescoes in the Sixtine Chapel. In two, at least, of the little series of the life of St. Jerome, we recognise Pintoricchio's own hand. In one, the doctors of the Church come to visit the saint after he has retired to the desert. The study for the lion in this scene is in his sketch-book. On the other side of the chapel is the exquisite little panel in which St. Jerome argues a point of doctrine with an infidel. This is a bit of genre-painting with all the charm the Umbrian painters understood so well. The red-robed saint sits in his great arm-chair; opposite him is placed a stately doctor in blue. Disciples are grouped on either hand, some have turbaned heads to suggest their unbelieving origin. Behind stand favourite dogs, and St. Jerome's faithful lion. The scene is lit up by the painting of a little window in the centre, through which the company looks out on a sunny landscape, with trees and a lake lying in mellow light and floating evening shades. A rich cloth hangs across the broad sill. The idea of the little outlook, throwing air and contrast into the interior, is one often afterwards elaborated by Pintoricchio, and apparently was suggested to him by a panel in Fiorenzo's miracles of San Bernardino.