history of Italian
art. They supply an element which, except in the work of Fra Angelico, was
defective at Florence; but to the Florentines was committed the great
charge of interpreting the spirit of Italian civilisation in all its
branches, not for the cloister only, or the oratory, but for humanity at
large, through painting.

Giotto and his followers, then, in the fourteenth century painted, as we
have seen, the religious, philosophical, and social conceptions of their
age. As artists, their great discovery was the secret of depicting life.
The ideas they expressed belonged to the Middle Ages. But by their method
and their spirit they anticipated the Renaissance. In executing their work
upon the walls of palaces and churches, they employed a kind of fresco.
Fresco was essentially the Florentine vehicle of expression. Among the
peoples of Central Italy it took the place of mosaic in Sicily, Ravenna,
and Venice, as the means of communicating ideas by forms to the unlettered
laity, and as affording to the artist the widest and the freest sphere for
the expression of his thoughts.[160]

FOOTNOTES:

[118] In the _History of Painting in Italy_, by Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle.

[119] Nothing is more astonishing than the sterility of Genoa and of
Rome. Neither in sculpture nor in painting did these cities produce
anything memorable, though Genoa was well placed for receiving the
influences of Pisa, and had the command of the marble quarries of
Carrara, while Rome was the resort of all the art-students of Italy. The
very early eminence of Apulia in architecture and the plastic arts led to
no results.

[120] Milan, it is true, produced a brilliant school of sculptors, and
the Certosa of Pavia is a monument of her spontaneous artistic genius.
But in painting, until the date of Lionardo's advent, she achieved
little.

[121] See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 182-188, for the
constitutional characteristics of Florence and Venice; and Vol. II.,
_Revival of Learning_, pp. 118-120, for the intellectual supremacy of
Florence.

[122] A glance at the map shows to what a large extent the Italians owed
the progress of their arts to Tuscany. Pisa, as we have already seen,
took the lead in sculpture. Florence, at a somewhat later period, revived
painting, while Siena contemporaneously developed a style peculiar to
herself. This Sienese style--thoroughly Tuscan, though different from
that of Florence--exercised an importa