charming.  The life of AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II., is here treated like a legend.  There is no attempt at representing the dress of half a century anterior to the painter’s date, or at rendering accurate historic portraiture.  Both Pope and Emperor are romantically conceived, and each portion of the tale is told as though it were a fit in some popular ballad.  So much remains of Perugian affectation as gives a kind of childlike grace to the studied attitudes and many-coloured groups of elegant young men.

We must always be careful to distinguish the importance of an artist considered as the exponent of his age from that which he may claim by virtue of some special skill or some peculiar quality of feeling.  The art of Perugino, for example, throws but little light upon the Renaissance taken as a whole.  Intrinsically valuable because of its technical perfection and its purity of sentiment, it was already in the painter’s lifetime superseded by a larger and a grander manner.  The progressive forces of the modern style found their channels outside him.  This again is true of Francesco Raibolini, surnamed Francia from his master in the goldsmith’s craft.  Francia is known to Englishmen as one of the most sincerely pious of Christian painters by his incomparable picture of the “Dead Christ” in our National Gallery.  The spirituality that renders Fra Angelico unintelligible to minds less ecstatically tempered than his own, is not found in such excess in Francia, nor does his work suffer from the insipidity of Perugino’s affectation.  Deep religious feeling is combined with physical beauty of the purest type in a masterpiece of tranquil grace.  A greater degree of naivete and naturalness compensates for the inferiority of Francia’s to Perugino’s supremely perfect handling.  This is true of Francia’s numerous pictures at Bologna; where indeed, in order to be rightly known, he should be studied by all lovers of the quattrocento style in its most delightful moments[226].  For mastery over oil painting and for charm of colour Francia challenges comparison with what is best in Perugino, though he did not quite attain the same technical excellence.

One more painter must delay us yet awhile within the limits of the fifteenth century.  Bartolommeo di Paolo del Fattorino, better known as Baccio della Porta or Fra Bartolommeo, forms at Florence the connecting link between the artists of the earlier Renaissance and the golden age[227].  By chronological reckoning he is nearly a quarter of a century later than Lionardo da Vinci, and is the exact contemporary of Michael Angelo.  As an artist, he has thoroughly outgrown the quattrocento style, and falls short only by a little of the greatest.  In assigning him a place among the predecessors and precursors of the full Renaissance, I am therefore influenced rather by the range of subjects he selected, and by the character of his genius, than by calculations of time or estimate of ability.