in a painter’s style the test of his degree of excellence; nor can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts.  The truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very considerable corruption of morality.  Painting felt this change; and the secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism.  Yet the art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has known—­neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full accomplished art and science, human.  After Italy, in the course of that century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting suffered from the general depression of the national genius.  The great luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice.  The subsequent history of Italian painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.

I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue’s picture, visited by Charles of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters, beneath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.[123] Yet this was the birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as Italian painting.  In this public act of joy the people of Florence recognised and paid enthusiastic honour to the art arisen among them from the dead.  If we rightly consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that a whole community should thus have hailed the presence in their midst of a new spirit of power and beauty.  It proves the widespread sensibility of the Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sympathy which, emanating from the people, was destined to inspire and brace the artist for his work.[124]

In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised by steps above the level of the church, still hangs this famous “Madonna” of the Rucellai—­not far, perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio’s youths and maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[125] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon—­we who have studied the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy from this beginning even to the last work of the latest Bolognese—­may do well to visit it with reverence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters whose lineage here takes its origin.