place, where he opened a kind of school for painters.  It is clear that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the antique.  During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.[171] From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at length in the next chapter.  For the present it is enough to observe that through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy.  There, as at Florence, painting was separated from ecclesiastical tradition, and a new starting-point was sought in the study of mathematical principles, and the striving after form for its own sake.

Without attempting the detailed history of painting in this period of divided energy and diverse effort, it is needful here to turn aside and notice those masters of the fifteenth century who remained comparatively uninfluenced by the scholastic studies of their contemporaries.  Of these, the earliest and most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great painter of the Gubbian school.[172] In the predella of his masterpiece at Florence there is a little panel, which attracts attention as one of the earliest attempts to represent a sunrise.  The sun has just appeared above one of those bare sweeping hill-sides so characteristic of Central Italian landscape.  Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey:  the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sideways on the burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field.  Along the road journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this little landscape a “Flight into Egypt,” if you choose.  Gentile, with all his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth had exquisite value.  The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and monkeys, are painted by him with scrupulous fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature than the wild flowers he has copied in the framework of this picture.  Yet we perceive that, though he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of the age, he had scarcely anything in common with masters like Uccello or Verocchio.