nnumerable craftsmen, no less skilled
in technical details than distinguished by rare taste. From the Pope upon
S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every
Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without
which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that
period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with
an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in
every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day,
when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have done their worst to denude
the country of its treasures, we still marvel at the incomparable and
countless beauties stored in every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture
galleries of Northern Europe, the country seats of English nobles, and the
palaces of Spain, the same reflection is still forced upon us: how could
Italy have done what she achieved within so short a space of time? What
must the houses and the churches once have been, from which these spoils
were taken, but which still remain so rich in masterpieces?
Psychologically to explain this universal capacity for the fine arts in
the nation at this epoch, is perhaps impossible. Yet the fact remains,
that he who would comprehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study
their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread throughout the
labyrinthine windings of national character. He must learn to recognise
that herein lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well as the
secret of their intellectual weakness.

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace in one inquiry the
different forms of art in Italy, or to analyse the connection of the
aesthetic instinct with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance.
Even the narrower task to which I must confine myself, is too vast for the
limits I am forced to impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with
Italian painting as the one complete product which remains from the
achievements of this period, touching upon sculpture and architecture more
superficially. Not only is painting the art in which the Italians among
all the nations of the modern world stand unapproachably alone, but it is
also the one that best enables us to gauge their genius at the time when
they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. In the history of the
Italian intellect painting takes the same rank as that of sculpture in the
Greek. Before beginning,