hy taught in the high school;[169] and the influence of
Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated by Vasari, was not
inconsiderable. This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was
early interested in the fine arts. Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste
for travel and collection,[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and
sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying
pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics
of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters.
Equipped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to Padua, his
native place, where he opened a kind of school for painters. It is clear
that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a
turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts
of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the
antique. During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less
than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and
drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.[171]
From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of
the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at
length in the next chapter. For the present it is enough to observe that
through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth
century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy. There, as at
Florence, painting was separated from ecclesiastical tradition, and a new
starting-point was sought in the study of mathematical principles, and
the striving after form for its own sake.

Without attempting the detailed history of painting in this period of
divided energy and diverse effort, it is needful here to turn aside and
notice those masters of the fifteenth century who remained comparatively
uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of their contemporaries. Of these,
the earliest and most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great
painter of the Gubbian school.[172] In the predella of his masterpiece at
Florence there is a little panel, which attracts attention as one of the
earliest attempts to represent a sunrise. The sun has just appeared above
one of those bare sweeping hill-sides so characteristic of Central Italian
landscape. Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey:
the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sid