influence was
incontestably great, but widely diffused. Bologna and Ferrara, Brescia and
Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, have excellent painters; and it is not
difficult to show that in each of these cities art assumed specific
characters. Yet the interest of the schools in these towns is due mainly
to the varied influences brought to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria,
and Milan. In other words they are affiliated, each according to its
geographical position, to the chief originative centres.

What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a
polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local
schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment.
Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of
the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading
characteristics of aesthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon
its specific differences. The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a
separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of
the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.[122]
In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages
in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the
history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and
stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders,
painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediaeval
Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study
of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to
realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of
expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of
secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival,
renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for
science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation
of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture,
occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual
motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments
of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic
legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this
abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a
plain decline from