s paintings,
subtle and full of grace. Simone was the greatest follower of Duccio.
Born in 1284, in 1324 he married Vanna di Memmo, and his brother, Lippo
Memmi, sometimes assisted him in his work. Lippo's hand cannot be
discerned in the Annunciation--none but Simone himself could have
achieved it; but the two saints, who stand one on either side, are his
work, as well as the four little figures in the frame.

Of the other early Sienese painters, only Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti
are represented in the Uffizi. The first, by a Madonna (15) and a
Thebaid; the second (16), in the two predella pictures for the
altar-piece of S. Procolo, Sassetta, the best of the Sienese
Quattrocento painters, is absent, and Vecchietta is only represented by
a predella picture (47); it is not till we came to Sodoma, whose famous
St. Sebastian (1279) suggests altogether another kind of art, a sensuous
and sometimes an almost hysterical sort of ecstasy, as in the Swooning
Virgin or the Swoon of St. Catherine at Siena, that we find Sienese
painting again.

III. THE UMBRIAN SCHOOL[123]

Influenced in the beginning by the Sienese, the Umbrian school of
painting remained almost entirely religious. The Renaissance passed it
by as in a dream, and although in the work of Perugino you find a
wonderful and original painter, a painter of landscape too, it is rather
in the earlier men, Ottaviano Nelli, whose beautiful work at Gubbio is
like a sunshine on the wall of S. Maria Nuova; Gentile da Fabriano,
whose Adoration of the Magi is one of the treasures of the Accademia
delle Belle Arti; of Niccolo da Foligno, and of Bonfigli whose
flower-like pictures are for the most part in the Pinacoteca at Perugia,
than in Perugino, or Pinturicchio, or Raphael, that you come upon the
most characteristic work of the school.

There was no Giotto, no Duccio even, in Umbria. Painting for its own
sake, or for the sake of beauty or life, never seems to have taken root
in that mystical soil; it is ever with a message of the Church that she
comes to us, very simply and sweetly for the most part, it is true, but
except in the work of Piero della Francesca, who was not really an
Umbrian at all, and in that of his pupil Melozzo da Forli, the work of
the school is sentimental and illustrative, passionately beautiful for a
moment with Gentile da Fabriano; clairvoyant almost in the best work of
Perugino; most beloved, though maybe not most lovely, in the marvellous
work of