There is in the art of Pintoricchio a direct simplicity of expression and gesture that saves him from conventionality and cloying sweetness. His persons are not above criticism as far as technicalities are concerned, but they have in them this, that they are occupied and absorbed in the business in hand. You may fancy at first that they are artificial, but that is merely their environment; they themselves are simple, they do not pose or look upwards or out of the picture with an affected appeal for admiration. This quality gives to Pintoricchio a truthfulness where he lacks depth. To the last he has a sincerity which underlies his conventionality, just as his dainty care in detail counterbalances his want of freedom and rhythm. His forms lack the nobility of Perugino's, his religious emotion is less deep, but he is not self-conscious, he has a freshness and raciness which saves him from fatiguing by monotonous sweetness. He does not make his paintings a series of excuses for the solution of scientific problems, so that they are more spontaneous, more the outcome of the man's natural unfettered inclination, than are the works of some of those who made greater discoveries in the field of painting.
In the picturesque qualities of his work he is completely a child of the Renaissance. Perhaps none harmonises better with the rich and lavish beauty which haunts us still in every little town of Italy. His feeling, sumptuous yet exquisite, his treatment, naïve yet distinguished, is the prerogative of that age of fresh perception, and of unspoiled acquaintance with the beautiful. It is the fairy-tale spirit that so endears him to us. Like the mediæval singers of romance, he guides us through scenes that have a glamour of some day of childhood, when they may have seemed real and possible. The wistful, wide-eyed youths, the tender, dainty Madonnas and angels, the grave, richly-dressed saints and bishops, might all stand for princes, for maidens, and magicians in some enchanted realm of fairy. He does not take us into the region of the tragic, but his fancy, his invention, and resource are fertile and untiring; he leads us on, dazzling, entertaining us with a child-like amusement, disarming criticism by a lovable quality which enlightens us as to the natural sensibility of the painter's mind, a sort of penetrating sweetness with which he can endow his creations. Perhaps the truest explanation of his charm is to be found in the union of two incongruous elements. The artificial and mannered grace, the search after the exquisite and the splendid, joined to the naïve and childish simplicity, the freshness and arcadian fancy of the Umbrian school. It is such a combination as enchants us in a child masquerading in gorgeous robes, or in a wild honeysuckle dancing over a richly-carved marble column. Certain it is, that here we possess the very cream of that fantastic aspect of the Renaissance in conjunction with the most distinctive features of purely Umbrian art.