Reviewing the ground traversed in this and the last chapter, we find that the painting of Tuscany, and in particular the Florentine section of it, has absorbed attention.  It is characteristic of the next age that other districts of Italy began to contribute their important quota to the general culture of the nation.  The force generated in Tuscany expanded and dilated till every section of the country took part in the movement which Florence had been first to propagate.  What was happening in scholarship began to manifest itself in art, for the same law of growth and distribution affected both alike; and thus the local differences of the Italians were to some extent abolished.  The nation, never destined to acquire political union in the Renaissance, possessed at last an intellectual unity in its painters and its students, which justifies our speaking of the great men of the golden period as Italians and not as citizens of such or such a burgh.  In the Middle Ages United Italy was an Idea to theorists like Dante, who dreamed for her an actual supremacy beneath her Emperor’s sway in Rome.  The reasoning to which they trusted proved fallacious, and their hopes were quenched.  Instead of the political empire of the “De Monarchia,” a spiritual empire had been created, and the Italians were never more powerful in Europe than when their sacred city was being plundered by the imperial bandits in 1527.  It is necessary, at the risk of some repetition, to keep this point before the reader, if only as an apology for the method of treatment to be followed in the next chapter, where the painters of the mid-Renaissance period will be reviewed less in relation to their schools and cities than as representatives of the Italian spirit.

Since the intellectual unity gained by the Italians in the age of the Renaissance was chiefly due to the Florentines, it is a matter of some moment to reconsider the direct influences brought to bear upon the arts in Florence during the fifteenth century.  I have chosen Ghirlandajo as the representative of painting in that period.  I have also expressed the opinion that his style is singularly cold and prosaic, and have hinted that this prosaic and cold quality was caused by a defect of emotional enthusiasm, by preoccupation with finite aims.  Herein Ghirlandajo did but reflect the temper of his age—­that temper which Cosimo de’ Medici, the greatest patron of both art and scholarship in Florence before 1470, represented in his life and in his public policy.  It concerns us, therefore, to take into account the nature of the patronage extended by the Medici to art.  Excessive praise and blame have been showered upon these burgher princes in almost equal quantities; so that, if we were to place Roscoe and Rio, as the representatives of conflicting views, in the scales together, they would balance each other, and leave the index quivering.  This bare statement warns the critic to be cautious, and inclines him to accept