to the genius of her aliens, was in no sense originative.  Rome produced no first-rate master from her own children, if we except Giulio Romano.  The title of originality is due rather to Padua, the birthplace of Mantegna, or to Parma, the city of Correggio, whose works display independence of either Florentine or Venetian traditions.  Yet these great masters were isolated, neither expressing in any definite form the character of their districts, nor founding a succession of local artists.  Their influence was incontestably great, but widely diffused.  Bologna and Ferrara, Brescia and Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, have excellent painters; and it is not difficult to show that in each of these cities art assumed specific characters.  Yet the interest of the schools in these towns is due mainly to the varied influences brought to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria, and Milan.  In other words they are affiliated, each according to its geographical position, to the chief originative centres.

What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment.  Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading characteristics of aesthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon its specific differences.  The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.[122] In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance.  Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediaeval Christianity.  In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular.  Mysticism gave way to realism.  It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of expression.  At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science.  The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation of actual things:  good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual motives.  On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic legends.  It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual feeling