The broad outlines of the subject can be briefly stated.  Surveying the map of Italy, we find that we may eliminate from our consideration the north-western and the southern provinces.  Not from Piedmont nor from Liguria, not from Rome nor from the extensive kingdom of Naples, does Italian painting take its origin, or at any period derive important contributions.[119] Lombardy, with the exception of Venice, is comparatively barren of originative elements.[120] To Tuscany, to Umbria, and to Venice, roughly speaking, are due the really creative forces of Italian painting; and these three districts were marked by strong peculiarities.  In art, as in politics, Florence and Venice exhibit distinct types of character.[121] The Florentines developed fresco, and devoted their genius to the expression of thought by scientific design.  The Venetians perfected oil-painting, and set forth the glory of the world as it appeals to the imagination and the senses.  The art of Florence may seem to some judges to savour over-much of intellectual dryness; the art of Venice, in the apprehension of another class of critics, offers something over-much of material richness.  More allied to the Tuscan than to the Venetian spirit, the Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine originality.  The cities of the Central Apennines owed their specific quality of religious fervour to the influences emanating from Assisi, the head-quarters of the cultus of S. Francis.  This pietism, nowhere else so paramount, except for a short period in Siena, constitutes the individuality of Umbria.

With regard to the rest of Italy, the old custom of speaking about schools and places, instead of signalising great masters, has led to misconception, by making it appear that local circumstances were more important than the facts justify.  We do not find elsewhere what we find in Tuscany, in Umbria, and in Venice—­a definite quality, native to the district, shared through many generations by all its painters, and culminating in a few men of commanding genius.  When, for instance, we speak of the School of Milan, what we mean is the continuation through Lionardo da Vinci and his pupils of the Florentine tradition, as modified by him and introduced into the Lombard capital.  That a special style was developed by Luini, Ferrari, and other artists of the Milanese duchy, so that their manner differs essentially from that of Parma and Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin.  The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils.  The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect.  Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise of their faculties than elsewhere.  But Rome, while she lent her imperial quality of grandeur