ction is instinct with pathos. For this
picture Quintin Matsys--popular painter as he was--got only three
hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, of course,
the value of money was much greater in those days). The Joiners'
Company, for whom he painted the 'Descent from the Cross,' sold the
picture to the City of Antwerp for five times the original amount, and
it is said Queen Elizabeth offered the City nearly twenty times the
first sum for it, in vain.

Quintin Matsys painted frequently half-length figures of the Virgin and
Child, an example of which is in the National Gallery. He excelled in
the 'figure painting' of familiar subjects, then just beginning to be
established, affording a token of the direction which the future
eminence of the Flemish painters would take. One of his famous pictures
of this kind is 'The Misers,' in the Queen's collection at Windsor. Two
figures in the Flemish costume of the time, are seated at a table;
before them are a heap of money and a book, in which one is writing with
his right hand, while he tells down the money with his left. The faces
express craft and cupidity. The details of the ink-horn on the table,
and the bird on its perch behind, have the Flemish graphic exactness.

CHAPTER III.

IN EARLY SCHOOLS OF ITALIAN ART--THE BELLINI, 1422-1512--MANTEGNA,
1431-1506--GHIRLANDAJO, 1449-1498--IL FRANCIA, 1450-1518--FRA
BARTOLOMMEO, 1469-1517--ANDREA DEL SARTO, 1488-1530.

I have come to the period when Italian art is divided into many
schools--Paduan, Venetian, Umbrian, Florentine, Roman, Bolognese, etc.,
etc. With the schools and their definitions I do not mean to meddle,
except it may be to mention to which school a great painter belonged.
Another difficulty meets me here. I have been trying so far as I could
to give the representative painters in the order of time. I can no
longer follow this rule strictly, and the grouping of this chapter is
made on the principle of leading my readers up by some of the
predecessors who linked the older to the later Italian painters, and by
some of the contemporaries of these later painters, to that central
four, Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, who
occupy so great a place in the history of art.

In the brothers Bellini and their native Venice, we must first deal with
that excellence of colouring for which the Venetian painters were
signally noted, while they comparatively neglected and underrate