LIKE so many ancient cities, Perugia has long outgrown her early walls, and much of the new town is remorselessly ugly. For that reason, the most appealing approach is from the north-east, the steep ascent from Ponte Rio, which rises to the earliest of the great monuments of the city, the Etruscan Arch of the inner enceinte. Through this, climb the narrow street to the flank of the cathedral and the piazza on the further side which is the true centre of the city. This is an irregular space, sloping downwards from the lateral façade of the church. At the centre is Giovanni Pisano’s Fontana Maggiore, begun in about 1275 and one of the masterpieces of its age, and beyond is the vast medieval complex of the Palazzo dei Priori, long the administrative hub of the city. Like so many Italian cities in the Middle Ages, Perugia was fought over by internal factions and external powers. Her dramatic history is implied by the loggia added to the cathedral by Braccio Fortebraccio from Montone, who in the 1420s came so close to carving out an Italian kingdom for himself, by the external pulpit at which San Bernardino of Siena preached, and by the superlative bronze statue of 1555 by the Perugian sculptor Vincenzo Danti of Pope Julius III, symbol of the authority that for over three centuries exercised a firm political control.
Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Fontana Maggiore, 1275–7.
Vincenzo Danti, Pope Julius III, bronze, 1555.
Perugia is a palimpsest. A quietly baroque façade may mask a medieval building, which in turn might overlie an Etruscan structure – as the Palazzo Sorbello does the remarkable Etruscan well. The churches, too, have for the most part been adapted to successive waves of taste; and because Bonaparte’s lieutenants had so clear an understanding of the importance of the greatest local painter, Pietro Vannucci, il Perugino, the city suffered grievously from their depredations. Thus it is that the two great altarpieces in the cathedral are both by outsiders, Signorelli from Cortona and Federico Barocci from Urbino, whose great Deposition must rank as one of the major masterpieces of the Counter-Reformation: their erstwhile companion, Perugino’s Marriage of the Virgin, is now at Caen.
The French could not bear off Perugino’s frescoes of the Collegio del Cambio, just beyond the Palazzo dei Priori. The decoration of the Audience Chamber, with the Nativity and Transfiguration flanked by classical heroes and sibyls under a vault of grotteschi of classical deities, is complemented by the equally meticulous woodwork; the painter’s direct and unpretending self-portrait in a fictive frame is set between his lines of heroes. High in the Palazzo dei Priori is the recently rearranged Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, which offers a matchless survey of painting in Perugia from the late thirteenth century. Nowhere else are such artists as Giovanni Boccati, Benedetto Bonfigli, Bartolomeo Caporali and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo so well represented, and the eight panels of miracles of San Bernardino painted in 1473 by Perugino, Pinturiccio and others are among the happiest achievements of the Umbrian Quattrocento. Masterpieces by artists from Tuscany, Duccio and Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca, testify to the range of Perugian patronage, but the loss of so much to the Vatican and the museums of provincial France means that the story is incomplete.
From the central hill on which the Etruscans originally built, Perugia extended a tentacled grip over the ridges to north and south. From the Porta Sole – near the church of San Severo with Raphael’s earliest extant fresco – you can see the northern area of the city; the ground falls away to the walls and the Etruscan Arch. Opposite this is the large Augustinian church and then the long ridge beyond, with monasteries where nuns will show their treasures and the huge brick Porta Sant’Angelo near the – much restored – early circular church of that saint. The young Raphael placed Saint Jerome before this view in a drawing now at Oxford.
Perugia’s most dramatic street is the narrow Via dei Priori that plunges northwards under the Palazzo dei Priori: there are houses, the uppermost now shops; a few palazzi; the unexpectedly coherent baroque Chiesa Nuova with an unfamiliar masterpiece, Francesco Trevisani’s Annunciation; the Oratorio of the Disciplinati di San Francesco, one of the confraternities by the membership of which the noblemen of Perugia set such store; a small Renaissance chapel, the Madonna della Luce; and not least, nestling beside the pink and white mass of the former church of San Francesco al Prato, the Oratorio di San Bernardino. This was constructed in 1457–61 when the cult of the reformist Sienese monk was at its most fervent; its glory is the polychrome façade with reliefs by the Florentine sculptor Agostino di Duccio, who had learnt the precepts of his fellow Florentine, the architect and classical theorist Leon Battista Alberti, but interpreted these with his own lyricism of line.
Another memorable walk takes you from the piazza to its southern counterpart, the Piazza del Sopramuro (now Matteotti) flanked by the long fifteenth-century façade of the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo. At the south-western corner a street twists downwards, lined now with shops, to the medieval façade of the church of Sant’Ercolano. This has hardly changed since it was depicted in Benedetto Bonfigli’s mural of the mid-Quattrocento in the Palazzo dei Priori. Below this, you join the main artery leading south to two of the finest churches of the city. First comes that of the Dominicans, vast and rather bare. The east window boasts some of the most ambitious stained glass of its date – 1402 – in Italy; nearby is the canopied Gothic tomb of Pope Benedict XI. A truncated altarpiece by Agostino di Duccio and fragments of fourteenth-century frescoes show how rich the church originally was. The convent was of commensurate scale and now houses the Museo Archeologico. Etruscan funerary urns may pall, but the reconstruction of the tomb of the Cai Cutu family, found by chance in 1983, does not. And the sixth-century bc bronze fittings of a carriage from Corciano are exceptional survivals.
Further south is one of the least expected monuments of mid-fifteenth-century Perugia, the Porta San Pietro. Inspired by Roman example and designed by Agostino di Duccio, this was the most ambitious Albertian structure of the period in Umbria. Beyond, outside the walls, is the monastery of San Pietro, whose pencil-sharp hexagonal campanile designed by the Florentine Bernardo Rossellino (1463–8) is one of the landmarks of Perugia. The church is reached through an atrium. Basilical in plan, this is richly furnished. The narrative intarsie of the choir of 1536 by Fra Damiano da Bergamo are surpassed by none of their date in Italy. Of Perugino’s large high altarpiece, only four predella panels remain, but otherwise the Benedictines were able to preserve most of their treasures. Eusebio da San Giorgio’s Adoration of the Magi is the only major Peruginesque altarpiece to remain in any Perugian church, although, perversely, its predella is now placed under another picture. Canvasses by the Perugian Giovanni Domenico Cerrini, the Marchigian Sassoferrato, the Orvietan Cesare Sermei and the Roman Giacinto Gimignani remind us that despite strict papal control Perugia was not altogether a backwater in the seventeenth century.
