e busy
stream of commercial life, should cultivate inquiries into theology
and the classics, which would only have been a hindrance to their own
practical business; but such, as it was well known, were of absorbing
interest in the circles which gathered round the Medici in Florence. The
school of art, which was now arising in Padua, was fed from such sources
as these. The love of the antique was becoming a fashion and a guiding
principle, and influenced the art of painting more formally than it
could succeed in doing among the independent and original Florentines.

Francesco Squarcione, though, as Vasari says, he may not have been the
best of painters, has left work (now at Berlin) which is accepted as
genuine and which shows that he was more than the mere organiser he is
sometimes called. He had travelled in Greece, and was apparently a
dealer, supplying the demand for classic fragments, which was becoming
widespread. When he founded his school in Padua he evidently was its
leading spirit and a powerful artistic influence. His pupils, even the
greatest, were long in breaking away from his convention, and few of
them threw it off entirely, even in after life. That convention was
carried with undeviating thoroughness into every detail. Draperies are
arranged in statuesque folds, designed to display every turn of the form
beneath; the figures are moulded with all the precision and limitations
of statuary. The very landscape becomes sculpturesque, and rocks of a
volcanic character are constructed with the regularity of masonry. The
colour and technique are equally uncompromising, and the surface becomes
a beautiful enamel, unyielding, definite in its lines, lacquer-like in
its firmness of finish, while the Gothic forms, which had hitherto been
so prevalent, were replaced by more or less pedantic adaptations from
Roman bas-reliefs. This system of design was practised most determinedly
in Padua itself, but it soon spread to Venice. Squarcione himself was
employed there after 1440, and though Antonio da Murano clung to the old
archaic style he saw the Paduan manner invading his kingdom, and his own
brother became strongly Squarcionesque.

The two brothers of Murano come most closely together in an altarpiece
in the gallery of Bologna, where the framework is more simple than
Alemanus's German taste would have permitted, and the Madonna and Child
have some natural ease, and the delicacy of feeling of primitive art.
Bartolommeo