It is extraordinary that no contract for these rooms has been discovered. No sign of the agreement for them remains in Alexander Borgia's account book. It is only from incidental mention in letters to and from Orvieto, and from payments made, that we can find out when the work was begun, and how long it lasted.
Messrs. Ehrle and Stevenson, in their monumental work on the Borgia Apartments, show very clearly that Pintoricchio's part only began with the second room. The private or living rooms of the Pope at that time were the second, or the Hall of Mysteries; the third, the Hall of Saints; and the fourth, or Arts and Sciences, besides the two withdrawing rooms. Vasari knew this quite well at the end of the sixteenth century. It is only with Chattard, about 1764, that the whole of the six rooms were said to have been decorated for Alexander VIII. In Vasari's life of Pintoricchio, he says the Pope made him paint the rooms he inhabited, and the Borgia Tower; and, more clearly still, in the life of Perino del Vaga, he says the latter was painting the vault of the Sala Pontifici, by which you enter the rooms of Pope Alexander, _already painted by Pintoricchio_. Taking off this room, there remain five, to which he assigned three years.
Our knowledge of contracts of the time enable us to construct pretty accurately what must have been the conditions of the missing agreement. The master would have been required to use the best colours, to begin and end within certain time limits, to design all the cartoons, and to paint the faces and principal parts with his own hand. We can gather from the existing work that Pintoricchio performed his share of such a contract honestly; assistants were evidently and inevitably employed, but the homogeneous character of the whole is remarkable, and proves, not only that the painter's supervision must have been incessant, but also that he had the power of directing and overseeing his pupils' work, so as to keep their individuality in sufficient abeyance to his own guiding influence. That he had by this time his own workshop of helpers and skilled painters working under him we do not doubt, but I do not think that any critics who have studied the consistent character of the work, now doubt that he had the supreme direction, and that he was undisturbed by rivals. The unity of ornament, too, leads us to believe that he directed and designed all this part himself. Probably the marble work is by Andrea Bregno, who had been working with him in the Sixtine Chapel, and Santa Maria del Popolo.