Niccolò Alunno is the painter of Foligno. Some of his work is scattered through the churches, and more is gathered together in the small Pinacoteca together with that of other early Umbrian masters. Very gold and brown the frescoes seemed, very sober and religious in their sentiment. Here one could study the Umbrian school, apart from the Peruginesque, and it struck us that the art of the first Umbrian painters was a natural, and (if one may say so in this age of critics) an inspired one, which sprang straight up from the soil about the feet of the painters, and was only influenced at certain purely decorative points by the teaching of the Florentines. The angels were the Umbrian children, well groomed, well fed, and wholly unaffected. Neither Paganism nor Christianity had very much to do with them. When Perugino's ripened influence came in, they weakened as garden flowers weaken, in their power of appeal through pure simplicity. The first faces of Umbrian saints and angels were simple like the Umbrian dog-rose. Perugino turned them into garden roses. Both in their way were fair, but the former flowers seemed nearer the divine than those which had been trained and cultivated.
It is not possible to mention here all the pictures of Foligno. There are two fine Alunnos in S. Niccolò; and a rather surprising Mantegna with the colour of brown wine--colour of passion and pain, which clashes with the Perugino just beside it--on the chapel of the Nunziatella. The Palazzo Communale is covered with the work of Nelli, but one feels that the painter who so loved what was gay and rich and beautiful (see his picture at Gubbio) wanted a lot more gold and ultramarine than his patron allowed him when painting the ceiling of this chapel.
Before leaving Foligno we went into the church of S. Maria infra Portas. It is so old, this little low basilica, that it has sunk quite deep into the soil around it. Inside are many faded frescoes, brown and gold, and full of almost painful early sentiment. As we stood among them in the dusk, a blackbird poured a flood of freshest song in through the door from the light of the courtyard. "How your bird sings!" we said to the custode. "Yes," said the man; "he sings all day; but whether for love or rage I cannot tell." ... And it struck us that no Umbrian of a hill town, or no Perugian anyway, would have made this profoundly melancholy statement about a tame bird's song.
