Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 4.djvu/97

Rh on four columns in the Church of the Minerva, and as he desired to add a picture, even though but a small one, thereby to leave a further memorial of himself; so the protonotary agreed with Perino, with whose fame he was acquainted, and caused him to paint the same in oil. The owner of the work furthermore desired that the subject thereof should be a Deposition of Christ from the Cross, which Perino at once set himself to execute with all his accustomed thought and care. The Saviour is represented as already laid on the earth, with the weeping Maries around him; and on the faces and in the attitudes of these women there is the expression of a most bitter grief, as well as the deepest compassion: there are besides, the Nicodemuses, and other figures all singularly beautiful, and all giving evidence of the sadness and affliction with which they regard the spotless Saviour, lying dead before them.

But a part of this work which is indeed divinely treated, is that wherein are the bodies of the two thieves, which remain fixed to the cross, and in which, to say nothing of the truth and reality of their appearance, which is indeed that of dead corpses, there is a fine development of the muscles and display of the nerves, for which this subject offered the master a favourable occasion. Wherefore, these figures appear before the eyes of him who regards them, with their members truly drawn and distorted by that violent death; the contraction of the nerves and muscles beneath the pressure of those cords and nails being clearly manifest. There is, besides, a landscape, the country represented as lying amid the darkness of the Crucifixion; this also is rendered with infinite discretion, and displays a profound knowledge of art. If it had not been for that inundation of the Tiber which followed on the plunder of Rome, and by which this work was damaged up to the half of its height, the excellence of the same would be manifest to all; but the water has so grievously softened the gesso, and has caused the panel to swell so much, that the work has peeled off to a degree which greatly detracts from the enjoyment of the beholder, nay, rather, which turns his pleasure into regret,