we
accord to him the place of historical honour. It should be added that,
like almost all the artists of this epoch, he handled sacred and profane,
ancient and modern, subjects in the same style, introducing contemporary
customs and costumes. His pictures are therefore valuable for their
portraits and their illustration of Florentine life. Fresco was his
favourite vehicle; and in this preference he showed himself a true master
of the school of Florence: but he is said to have maintained that mosaic,
as more durable, was superior to wall-painting. This saying, if it be
authentic, justifies our criticism of his cold achievement as a painter.

Reviewing the ground traversed in this and the last chapter, we find that
the painting of Tuscany, and in particular the Florentine section of it,
has absorbed attention. It is characteristic of the next age that other
districts of Italy began to contribute their important quota to the
general culture of the nation. The force generated in Tuscany expanded and
dilated till every section of the country took part in the movement which
Florence had been first to propagate. What was happening in scholarship
began to manifest itself in art, for the same law of growth and
distribution affected both alike; and thus the local differences of the
Italians were to some extent abolished. The nation, never destined to
acquire political union in the Renaissance, possessed at last an
intellectual unity in its painters and its students, which justifies our
speaking of the great men of the golden period as Italians and not as
citizens of such or such a burgh. In the Middle Ages United Italy was an
Idea to theorists like Dante, who dreamed for her an actual supremacy
beneath her Emperor's sway in Rome. The reasoning to which they trusted
proved fallacious, and their hopes were quenched. Instead of the political
empire of the "De Monarchia," a spiritual empire had been created, and the
Italians were never more powerful in Europe than when their sacred city
was being plundered by the imperial bandits in 1527. It is necessary, at
the risk of some repetition, to keep this point before the reader, if only
as an apology for the method of treatment to be followed in the next
chapter, where the painters of the mid-Renaissance period will be reviewed
less in relation to their schools and cities than as representatives of
the Italian spirit.

Since the intellectual unity gained by the Italians in the age of the