picked up his way of painting in Italy. Certainly he and
other Venetians and Italians about this time improved their technical
methods as the Van Eycks had done, and this picture is an early example
of that more brilliant fashion of painting. There is here a Flemish
love of detail. The Italian painters had been more accustomed to
painting upon walls than the Flemings, for the latter had soon
discovered that a damp northern climate was not favourable to the
preservation of wall-paintings. Fresco does not admit of much detail,
as each day's work has to be finished in the day, before the plaster
dries. Thus, a long tradition of fresco painting had accustomed the
Italian painters to a broad method of treatment, which they maintained
to a certain extent even in their panel pictures. But in our St. Jerome
we see a wealth of detail unsurpassed even by John van Eyck.

One needs a magnifying-glass to see everything there is to be seen
in the landscape through the window on the left. Besides the city with
its towers and walls and the mountains behind, there is a river in
the foreground where two little people are sitting in a boat. Observe
every tiny stone in the pavement, and every open page of the books
on the shelves. Here, too, is breadth in the handling. Hold the book
far away from you, so that the detail of the picture vanishes and only
the broad masses of the composition stand out. You still have what
is essential. The picture is one in which Italian feeling and sentiment
blend with Flemish technique and love of little things. There has
always been something of a mystery about the picture, and you must
not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did
not paint it at all. Such changes in the attributions of unsigned
paintings are not uncommon.

One of the greatest pioneer artists of the fifteenth century was Andrea
Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy. More than any other painter
of his day, he devoted himself to the study of ancient sculpture, even
to the extent of sometimes painting in monochrome to imitate the actual
marble. Paintings by him, which look like sculptured reliefs, are in
the National Gallery; and at Hampton Court is a series of cartoons
representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar, in which the conception
and the handling are throughout inspired by old Roman bas-reliefs.
In other pictures of his, the figures look as though cast of bronze,
for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors