ance or 'rebirth.'

When you first looked at this picture you must have thought it very
different from the two earlier ones. Such a subject could only have
been painted thus in an age when men admired the scholar's life. Though
the figure is called that of St. Jerome, there is really nothing
typically saintly about him; he is only serious. The subjects chosen
by painters of the Renaissance were no longer almost solely religious,
but began to be selected from the world of everyday life; even when
the subject was taken from Christian legend, it was now generally
treated as an event happening in the actual world of the painter's
own day.

The manner in which this picture is painted is still more suggestive
of change than the subject itself. Our artist knew a great deal about
the new science of perspective, for instance. One might almost think
that, pleased with his new knowledge, he had multiplied the number
of objects on the shelves so as to show how well he could foreshorten
them. Medieval painters had not troubled about perspective, and were
more concerned, as we have seen, to make a pretty pattern of shapes
and colours for their pictures. The Van Eycks, as we noted, only
acquired the beginnings of an understanding of it, and were very proud
of their new knowledge. It was in Italy that all the rules were at
last brought to light.

The Renaissance Period in Italy may be considered as lasting from 1400
to 1550. The pioneer artists who mastered perspective and worked at
the human figure till they could draw it correctly in any attitude,
lived in the first seventy-five years of the fifteenth century. They
were the breakers of stone and hewers of wood who prepared the way
for the greater artists of the end of the century, but in the process
of learning, many of them painted very lovely things.

The painter of our picture lived within those seventy-five years. He
was, probably, a certain Antonello of Messina--that same town in Sicily
recently wrecked by earthquakes. Of his life little is known. He seems
to have worked chiefly in Venice where there was a fine school of
painting during the Renaissance Period; his senior Giovanni Bellini,
one of the early great painters of Venice, some of whose pictures are
in the National Gallery, taught him much. It is also said that Antonello
went to the Netherlands and there learnt the method of laying paint
on panel invented by the Van Eycks. Modern students say he did not,
but that he