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at after detailed accounts of the lives of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, many painters of the first rank still remain to be treated of in the second place, as it were, a number of them exhibiting some quality that has given them an almost unique distinction in the history of art. Some of these great painters are acknowledged to be among the most distinguished artists of all time. When it is realized that men like Fra Angelico, Perugino, Botticelli, Titian, Correggio, Tintoretto and Veronese have to be grouped together in a single chapter, the necessities of compression in our account of the century will begin to be appreciated. Each of them deserves, for any adequate presentation of his work, not a few paragraphs, but a large volume, and about each of them indeed not one but many volumes have been written even centuries after their deaths. It must not be forgotten that almost the same abbreviation of the story must be made for any other phase of the century's achievements.

When Columbus' Century opened, Fra Angelico had just been summoned to Rome to set about what has usually been considered the crowning labor of his life. This was the painting in fresco of the walls of the small oratory in the Vatican, since known as the chapel of Nicholas V, because the decoration of it was ordered by that great pontiff, a man of deep scholarship and an enlightened patron of the fine arts, whose aim to make Rome not only the centre of the religious life, but also of the best influences for art and science for all the world, has come to be well recognized. Artists and art critics have been almost fulsome in their praise of these decorations of Fra Angelico. The walls were covered on three sides with two series of paintings, the upper portion illustrating the life of St. Stephen, the lower that of St. Lawrence. That two sets of subjects so similar should have been treated in close juxtaposition without any repetition in design or composition is in itself the best possible evidence of the artist's power and his constructive imagination. The designs show a freshness of conception very remarkable in a man of advanced years, yet withal there is absolutely no falling off in the power and sincerity of his art, and if anything a deepening of the religious feeling so characteristic of him. When he did this work he was probably past sixty-five years of age.

Fortunately in our day, when it is so easy to obtain cheap reproductions of the works of all the great painters, and when copies in color of Fra Angelico's paintings may readily be secured, anyone may know for himself something at least of the sweetness and power of this charming painter of the early Renaissance. His Madonnas have a most taking motherly expression and yet are full of the mystic saintliness that becomes the Mother of God. His angels are a constantly-repeated argument and impelling appeal for the existence of these invisible creatures, which have been well declared to look so real as to be convincing. His pictures of Christ as man and boy are replete with humanity, and yet have the Divinity shining through the veils of flesh. No one but a man who believed firmly, completely and entirely in what he was painting could ever have given us these marvellous representations. It is easy to understand, then, that when it comes to his pictures of the saints Fra Angelico has given us, absolutely true to life, representations of them in various actions as their activities appeal to him. Among them he has introduced some portraits of his friends, thus laying the foundation of that portrait painting which was to develop so finely in the next generation and which was fortunately to preserve for us the features of so many whom we would like to have known. In the meantime, in the background of his pictures he has given us the beginning of modern landscape painting in all the beauty and charm of his own, simple, single-hearted way of looking at the beauties of nature.

One of the most important of the Italian painters of the first half of Columbus' Century, all the more interesting because he was young Raphael's master, was Pietro Vannucci, whom, from the name of his adopted town Perugia, the world of art knows as Perugino. He was born just before the century began in 1447. His parents were poor, though not of low condition, and as a boy Pietro worked as a shop drudge with a painter in Perugia. There has been much discussion as to who this painter was, and probably the best determination is Niccolo da Foligno, who is sometimes considered the originator of the school of Umbrian painters, in which Perugino thereafter took so important a place. Niccolo was himself a pupil of Benozzo Gozzoli, who owed his training to Fra Angelico. There were other artists at Perugia under whose influence young Perugino came, and their names, when taken in connection with those already mentioned, will show the wondrous art influences abroad in the period. Vasari mentions also Bonfigli, known also as Benedetto Buonfiglio, whose work can be seen at its best only in Perugia and is well deserving of study, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, in whom the typical Umbrian landscapes, which are so important a feature in Perugino's pictures, first make their appearance. A still more important influence in Perugino's life was Piero della Francesca, who was perhaps at Perugia for a while, though Perugino may have met him elsewhere.

After his apprentice work in art at Perugia, Perugino travelled and was influenced by such men as Luca Signorelli, Lorenzo and the group of great painters then at Florence, including Ghirlandajo, Cosi, Moroselli and Botticelli, as well as the master Verrocchio, in whose studio, or rather workshop, Perugino probably came in contact with Leonardo da Vinci and also Lorenzo di Credi. There are two oft-quoted lines from Giovanni Santi, "two youths alike in age and love, Leonardo da Vinci and the Perugian Peter of Pieve." It was Perugino's merit to have reached distinction, even amongst these, and his religious pictures have a value all their own. After his years of training and journeying, Perugino had his opportunity at Rome, especially in the Sistine Chapel. Of his work there, Berenson said in his "Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance," "It is the golden joyous color and the fine rhythm of the groups and above all the buoyant spaciousness of this fresco that win and hold us." He has spoken of "the golden dreamy summerings" of his pictures in the Louvre, and especially "the round containing the Madonna with the guardian saints and angels, all dipped in the color of Heaven, dreaming away in bliss the glowing summer afternoon." Perugino's power to paint man "not as a mite against infinity, but as man should be in Eden, dominant and towering high over the horizon," has given him a place all his own. "It is this exaltation of human being over the landscape that not only justifies but renders paintings great."

Grimm, in his "Life of Michelangelo," goes out of his way to say that "Perugino's work in the Sistine Chapel far surpasses the others, though they include such great men as Botticelli, Signorelli and Ghirlandajo. His simplicity, his symmetry, his thoughtful composition and finishing of individual figures, though in the others these are often in masses, scarcely to be distinguished, all these give a surpassing distinction to his painting."

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Perugino that has been paid by subsequent generations is the attribution to Raphael of some of the works that have since been determined to be Perugino's. "Apollo and Marsyas" of the Louvre, Paris, which has had its place in the Salon Carr? for thirty years, is a typical example and is still called a Raphael in the Louvre catalogue, though now it has been almost definitely assigned to Perugino. Most of the important galleries of Europe have pictures that they value very highly that were done by Perugino, and mistakes with regard to his work have always been such as indicated the highest appreciation of Perugino, for they have been attributed to great masters.

One of the great painters of this time who, if he had done nothing else but influence Raphael deeply, would deserve a place in any account of the art of this century is Fra Bartolommeo. He was the intimate personal friend of Savonarola and painted the well-known portrait of the great preacher after the unfortunate execution of the friar. At a time when the Order of St. Dominic was very unpopular, Bartolommeo entered it in 1500, and for a time gave up painting. He returned to his art, however, "for the profit of the Convent and the glory of God." Quite naturally he was very much influenced by the works of Fra Angelico, his brother, in religion, which were all round him in the monastery of San Marco, and also came under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, who worked at Florence during the first decade of the sixteenth century. Bartolommeo had charge of the studio San Marco, and it was here that Raphael came in contact with him to the mutual benefit of both the painters, though Raphael was much the younger man. In 1508 Bartolommeo visited Venice and came under the spell of the rich coloring of Bellini and Titian.

Fra Bartolommeo's greatest works are probably the "Marriage of St. Catherine," "The Last Judgment," now in the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, Florence, the picture which is said to have attracted the attention of Raphael, and the well-known "Descent from the Cross," or as it is often called, "Lamentation over Christ," "in which the expression of suffering on the faces is charmingly differentiated for the various characters of St. John, the Magdalen and the Blessed Virgin, and so subdued that a heavenly peace illumines the group." It has been declared that Bartolommeo united the spirituality of Fra Angelico to the perfect treatment in form and color of Raphael, combined with a gentle gravity that was all his own and a devotion that was part of his life. The "Descent from the Cross" is one of his last works and, far from showing any sign of failing power, is masterly and firm. In anatomy and composition and color it is unsurpassed; in delicacy of feeling and religious devotion it is considered one of the great pictures of the world. His portrait of "Savonarola," a work of love on the part of an ardent disciple, is deservedly his best-known work and is one of the great portraits of all time, worthy to be placed beside those of such masters of portraiture as Bellini, Titian, Raphael and even Leonardo.

Among the other secondary painters of Columbus' time one of the greatest, an artist who would have stood out above all his contemporaries in almost any other period of art, is Sandro Botticelli. He is the only contemporary whom Leonardo mentions in his "Treatise on Painting." A quarter of a century ago Walter Pater, in his Renaissance essays, said of him in regard to this distinction of being mentioned by Leonardo:

"This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some it will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment, for people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work; and his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of classical stories; or if he painted religious incidents, painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject."

In his pictures of "Spring" and the "Birth of Venus," Botticelli has shown his power to paint great imaginative pictures, and the "Venus" particularly shows his faculty of expressing the intimate, elusive psychology of his subject. In his little sketch of Botticelli, Streeter says:

"Perhaps the most striking thing in this dainty discerned vision of antiquity is the conscious emphasis laid on the distance from which the vision is beheld. The sorrow Botticelli had learned to restrain in his recent 'Madonnas' breaks out afresh in the wistful plaintiveness of the goddess of pleasure, separated from her true home by 'the travail of the world through twenty centuries,' by a 'yawning sepulchre wherein the old faiths of the world lay buried and whence Christ had arisen.' It would seem, not as some critics have asserted, that Botticelli strove, and strove in vain, to achieve the true embodiment of a pagan ideal, but rather that he sought in this strange mingling of pagan and mediaeval sentiment to express his own profound instinct of the impossibility, to a later age, of ever reaching it."

Until Botticelli has been studied faithfully and seriously, most people are likely to think of him as a painter of what he saw with a certain poetic charm and a naivete which makes him by contrast particularly interesting to the modern world. Few realize how much appreciative students of Botticelli, who are at the same time art critics, have learned to think of his high seriousness, his lofty purpose and his marvellous execution in his paintings. It is above all for his psychology that he has come to be admired in the modern time, and as our own interest in psychology has deepened, the appreciation for Botticelli has grown. He was gifted with a profound psychological insight into character, which he knew how to express with almost incredible simplicity and directness. Talking of his St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Eligius and St. John, a well-known German critic. Prof. Steinman, recently said:

"It would seem that in these four strongly contrasting figures Botticelli aimed at portraying the four human temperaments in their separate and distinctive modes of response to the same spiritual appeal: the fiery enthusiasm of the impulsive St. John, looking upwards, rapt in wonder; the studious concentration with which St. Augustine, who here represents the phlegmatic temperament, unmoved, continues his writing; the nerve-strained longing of St. Jerome, worn and wasted with many fastings and watchings; and the benignity of the sanguine St. Eligius, who, gazing before him, raises his hand in blessing. With consummate skill, Botticelli has distinguished between the reality of these living figures and the ideal quality of the celestial vision. And a special artistic interest is given to this picture, making it a typical instance of the rare versatility of the painter's genius, by the fact that in the vigorous, massive, realistic portraiture of the saints, in the fantastic, poetical delicacy of the angelic choirs, in the stiff, severe traditionalism of the central figures of the mystery, it shows three separate modes of imaginative conception, three separate methods in the manipulation of line and colour, so distinct and individualized that it would seem almost that they must be the work of three separate artists."

A very great painter, who is not often appreciated as he should be outside of Italy, though in recent years he is much better known, is Giovanni Bellini, the distinguished Venetian painter. His portrait of the "Doge Loredano" is now recognized as one of the world's great portraits, and copies of it are to be seen everywhere. His masterpieces, however, are his altar pictures, which are noted for their beauty and devotional quality. His Madonnas particularly are famous. His well-known painting at Berlin of the "Angels Mourning over Christ" is probably one of the most humanly touching of mystical pictures. The "Presentation of the Infant Christ" in the Temple, in which Mary is shown presenting the child to the High Priest over a table, while the striking expression of worship on the faces of old Simeon and Joseph completes the meaning of the picture in wondrous fashion, is another typical example of Bellini's power to express the loftiest devotional sentiments.

Among those in second rank in this great period of art, one of the greatest was surely Titian. In any other period he would quite easily have been the greatest painter of his time. His painting was done in Venice, and his early training was in glass work and mosaic work, to which apparently must be attributed his marvellous development of color in painting. At the age of about fifteen he entered the studio of Giovanni Bellini, at that time the greatest of Venetian painters and one of the important contributors to the art of this period. In this studio a group of young men, including Giorgione, with whom Titian came to be on terms of intimate friendship, Giovanni Palma, Lorenzo Lotto and Sebastiano Luciani, all destined to fame, were brought together. Especially Titian and Giorgione broke away from the older traditions of painting and became founders in modern art. All of his long productive life of nearly 100 years, except for very short visits elsewhere, Titian lived in Venice and did his marvellous painting there. There are masterpieces by him that are acknowledged by artists and critics to be among the greatest paintings we have. No one has been more faithfully studied by art students in all the generations since his time. Some of his Madonnas are among the most beautiful in the world and bear comparison even with all but the very finest of Raphael's. His "Entombment of Christ" in the Louvre is a surpassing representation of this scene which so often appealed to artists. The "Assumption" at the Academy in Venice is probably one of the most visited of pictures in Italy and shows all the best qualities, though some also of the defects, of the great Venetian.

Such pictures as the "Presentation of the Blessed Virgin," in the Vatican at Rome, show how Titian faithfully developed his best powers until he arrived at the very climax of artistic expression. No more thoroughly satisfying representations of religious themes were probably ever made. While he could make wonderful pictures on a large scale, and his compositions have always been the subject of loving study, some of his smaller pictures are almost more beautiful than any he has made, and his series of small Madonnas are only equalled and very few of them surpassed even by Raphael's treatment of the same theme.

As a portrait painter, however, Titian almost excelled his work as a religious painter. His series of portraits of the Emperor Charles V are among the world's greatest portraits. His portrayals of Philip II are thought by some even to surpass those of his father. Titian's portraits of himself and his daughter are wonderful "counterfeit presentments" of the real individuals. Indeed, the portraits of his contemporaries left us by Titian have an eternal interest, and besides being great works of art they are marvellously illuminating of the human personalities depicted. They represent not merely a reproduction of the features of the individual, but preserve for posterity the character and the very soul. Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael have surpassed him when they set themselves the same task. Van Dyke is his equal in some respects, but much less satisfying. Rembrandt and Velasquez are his peers, but there are those who think that he combines the best qualities of both these great successors in the same field to a noteworthy degree.

Besides his religious pictures and portraits, however, Titian succeeded in painting some of the greatest representations of ancient mythological lore that have ever been done. His much-admired picture of the "Bacchanals" in Madrid and the still more famous "Bacchus and Ariadne," so often now seen in copies, show how well he could enter into the spirit of the old Olympian mythology. It was typical of the Renaissance time in which he lived that he should thus be inspired by Greek culture and religion. If we did not have from his hands so many beautiful Christian devotional pictures, which never could have been painted except by a man who was himself a believer in the religious scenes and mysteries that he portrays, it would have been almost impossible to believe, after a study of these pagan pictures, that he could have retained a devout Christian piety and faith with such a sympathetic appreciation and an intimate understanding of the psychology of the old pagan myths. It was this combination, however, that was perfectly possible to the great minds of the Renaissance period. The greater they were like Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael, the deeper was their faith, though the higher their power to portray phases of religious feeling that might be considered so foreign to their religious experience as to be quite out of the range of their sympathetic expression. Smaller men, influenced by Greek mythology, became merely pagan, but the greater men retained their faith in its completeness. The smaller men are so much more numerous that we have the tradition of the Renaissance making men pagan, but this is not true with regard to the geniuses of the time.

A very great school of art of the Renaissance was that which took its rise in Southern Tuscany and the Romagna, of whom the three best-known representatives are Piero dei Franceschi, Luca Signorelli and Melozzo da Forli. Piero's influence on Perugino has already been spoken of. Berenson declares him "hardly inferior to Giotto and Masaccio in feeling for tactile values; in communicating values of force he is the rival of Donatello; he was perhaps the first to use effects of light for their direct tonic or subduing and soothing qualities; and, finally judged as an illustrator, it may be questioned whether another painter has ever presented a world more complete and convincing, has ever had an ideal more majestic, or ever endowed things with more heroic significance."

Piero's two pupils, Melozzo and Signorelli, each of them starting, as Berenson says, with the heritage Piero left him, yet following the promptings of his own temperament and the guidance of his own genius, touched excellence in his own splendid way. Melozzo was the grander temperament, Signorelli the subtler and deeper mind. Visitors to Loretto, who see the music-making angels in a cupola there, are likely to be surprised into an appreciation of the power of the painter to express something of the witchery of music. Berenson says of them: "Almost they are French Gothic in their witchery, and they listen to their own playing as if to charm out the most secret spirit of their instruments. And you can see what a sense Signorelli had for refined beauty, if, when seated with Guido's 'Aurora,' you will rest your eyes on a Madonna by him in the same pavilion of the Rospigliosi Palace."

Grimm, in his "Life of Michelangelo," says of Correggio: "As Parma, where he painted, lies between Milan, Florence and Venice, so does Correggio's painting represent a middle term between the schools of these cities. Greater than all who came after Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael there are many qualities of his art in which Correggio excels even these. Unlike the Venetians, he did not neglect drawing; he embraced the whole of his art and made a distinct advance."

Grimm goes as far as to say, "If we could think of streams flowing together out of the genius of Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Michelangelo to form a new spirit, that spirit would be Correggio's. He has the dreamy smiling sweetness of Leonardo, and to add an external detail, his fate as to our absolute ignorance of his inner and outer life; he has the joyous, radiant, uncreated quality of Raphael with his brief life and its interruption in the very bloom of it; he has the boldness of Michelangelo, his liking for unprecedented attitudes and his power to reproduce them in marvellous foreshortening; he has Titian's soft coloring and the gift to picture the palpitating naked flesh as if the pulse was beating in it."

It is one of the world's greatest losses in art that he was cut off in his prime at the early age of thirty, yet what we have from him shows the supreme artist, and though we might have had further precious art treasures, we could scarcely have had a completer revelation of his genius.

Leigh Hunt, in his article on him in the "Catholic Encyclopaedia," emphasizes the far-reaching influence which Correggio's work had over artists after his time and how deeply the principles of his art prevailed in painting and sculpture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over all Italy and France.

A very great painter of Columbus' Century, though he is usually thought of as of a later period, was Jacopo Robusti, whom we know as Tintoretto. According to Ridolfi, himself born almost on the date of Tintoretto's death, the artist was born in 1512, though later dates up to 1520 have been assumed for him. Like many of the other great workers of the Renaissance, he too lived to be at least seventy-five and probably well beyond eighty. The same store of energy that enabled him to accomplish his work gave him length of days. He was the son of a dyer, and, as a boy, was fond of drawing, finding the colors used by his father valuable for practice in painting. While he lived at a time when many of the great painters of the Renaissance were at work, he was not deeply influenced by them, but fortunately for himself developed his own genius. He is famous for his drawing, his power over which he owed to dissection, drawing from life and from models draped and lighted in various ways, some of them suspended from the ceiling so as to get the correct prospective of flying figures. He invented an ingenious device, a rectangular framework with strings across it which, held before the eye, taught how to measure the proportions accurately. While Venetian painters generally are famous for their coloring, Tintoretto is the master of them all in drawing and one of the world's greatest artists in Italy.

An eminent painter of the Venetian school at this time, who is usually thought of as belonging to a later period, is Paolo Cagliari, better known as Veronese. He was twenty-two years of age, however, before Columbus' Century closed, and as he began his work very early in life he had received some important commissions before he was twenty-five years of age. He owes all his training to the great period at least. His greatest picture, the "Marriage at Cana," was painted practically within the decade after the close of our period. He was very fond of huge compositions, and Tintoretto alone outdid him in the conception of large pictures and the filling of large canvases. Like most of the painters of the Renaissance, he was a man of tireless energy, as well as sharing the facility that so many of them possessed; his very large pictures did not serve to limit the number of his paintings to the extent that might otherwise be expected. He was a master of decoration and of the use of the sumptuous color that the Venetians had invented because of their familiarity with pigments and the making of glass, and no great decorative painter has equalled him in the effect produced by this wealth of color. Already the decadence is beginning and his great paintings lack feeling, and above all exhibit no trace of religious feeling, though many of them are on religious subjects, but they are splendid, unexcelled, cold triumphs of composition.

These great painters of the Renaissance, touched by the humanistic spirit abroad in the world of their time and with the old Greek ideas of the place of man as the very centre of the universe, created a new way of looking at men in their relation to the world around them. They Hellenized their vision of men and stamped it upon the culture and civilization of their time. Berenson has suggested in his "The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance" that they thus influenced not only men's way of looking at men, but actually to some degree transformed men themselves by the mirror they held before them. He said:

"The way of visualizing, affected by the artists, the humanists and the ruling classes, could not help becoming universal. Who had the power to break through this new standard of vision and, out of the chaos of things, to select shapes more definitely expressive of reality than those fixed by men of genius? No one had such power. People had perforce to see things in that way and in no other, to see only the shapes depicted, to love only the ideals presented. Nor was this all. Owing to this subtle and most irresistible of all forces, the unconscious habits of imitation, people soon ended either by actually resembling the new ideals or, at all events, earnestly endeavoring to be like them. The result has been that, after five centuries of constant imitation of a type first presented by Donatello and Masaccio, we have, as a race, come to be more like that type than we ever were before. For there is no more curious truth than the trite statement that nature imitates art. Art teaches us not only what to see, but what to be."

PAINTING OUTSIDE OF ITALY

While it is the custom to think of our period, Columbus' Century, as the time of the Renaissance, owing its inspiration to the rebirth of Greek ideas into the modern world, it must not be forgotten that quite apart from this there was a "great wind of the spirit" of art blowing abroad at this epoch. The Renaissance is thought of as Italian, but the Teutonic countries exhibit in Columbus' Century a great artistic development at the beginning quite uninfluenced by the New Learning that came from the Greek rebirth. Painting, sculpture, architecture and the arts and crafts, all reached a climax of expression in the Teutonic countries, especially in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the evidence for which is to be seen in the monuments preserved for us particularly in the Low Countries and in Southern Germany.

Flemish art above all others reached a high level of perfection at this time that has scarcely ever or anywhere been surpassed. The work of the brothers Van Eyck, accomplished just before the opening of Columbus' Century, paved the way for a great new development of art and made their invention of painting in oil the favorite medium of pictorial expression. After such a work as "The Adoration of the Lamb," at Ghent, no one could doubt either of their genius as artists or the future of the new mode in painting. Their pupil, Roger Van der Weyden, did not excel his masters, but carried on worthily the tradition which they had established, and passed on the torch which they had lighted to successors whose fame was to be undying. Memling is indeed a great master in painting, almost never excelled, seldom equalled and representing a phase of art development quite independent of the humanistic side of the Renaissance.

The wonderful decorations of the casket of St. Ursula in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges, done just about the time of the discovery of America, are not unworthy to be placed beside the greatest art of Europe from any period. The almost more beautiful "Adoration of the Magi" in the same place shows a minute finish in detail, a marvellous power of composition, a charm of expression and a wonderful application of colors which have not faded during all these four and a half centuries, which deservedly place it among the world's supreme artistic triumphs. What Giotto is at Padua in the Arena, and Fra Angelico in San Marco at Florence, Memling is in the Hospital of St. John at Bruges. The pictures must be seen in all the glory of their unfading colors to be properly appreciated or to enable those who are less familiar with the great work of the Netherlands painters to understand the encomiums of critics; but even uncolored reproductions give some idea of the charm of the originals.

Strange to say, because of the neglect of the biographical details of their painters' lives by the Teutonic nations, even Memling's name has not been quite certain until comparatively recent years. Bruges was one of the great merchant towns of this time, wealthy, populous, busy, enterprising, ambitious, the home of merchant princes who were as generous in their patronage of art as the ecclesiastics or nobility of Italy, or as our own millionaires, though they believed in the creation of new works of art especially adapted to their surroundings rather than the collection of those that had an established reputation. During the first half of the fifteenth century Brabant had produced the group of famous artists whom we have mentioned, most of whom worked at some time or other in Bruges. As Weale, himself an associate of the Royal Academy of Belgium, says in his "Hans Memlinc": "Of none of all the many celebrated men who made this town their home has Bruges more reason to be proud than of Hans Memlinc." While his works remained, however, the personal memory of him was lost, and hence it is only in our time that it has been quite sure that the initial letter of his name should be "M" and not "H," though the other form is often used by writers about art, and that the final letter should probably be "c" and not "g" though in English the latter terminal has been most frequent.

It was only in 1889 that Father Dussart, S.J., discovered in the Public Library of St. Omer in a manuscript by the historian, James De Meyere, an extract from a diary, in which the death of John Memmelinc, the painter, is placed on the 11th of August, 1494. He was probably born about 1435, or a little before, so that his accomplishment as a painter was all in the first half of Columbus' Century. Memling is the greatest of all these early painters of the Netherlands in his portraits, and yet there are many religious pictures which are full of the devotion of the best of the Italians and wonderful in their composition, in their solution of the technical problems of painting and their marvellous power of expression which show him to be one of the great painters of the world. His great picture, which has been called "Christ the Light of the World," is a triumph in every mode of the painter's expression. His shrine of St. Ursula, an oblong tabernacle of carved oak with gabled ends, for which Memling did a series of miniatures, is one of the most beautiful accomplishments of this kind in the world. In very contracted panels, Memling has placed hundreds of beautiful faces and details of architecture, shipping and water scenes that must be seen to be appreciated. "It has been said that Van Eyck, even when painting religious subjects, only awakes earthly ideas, whilst Memling, even when painting earthly scenes, kindles thoughts of heavenly things. It is easy to see by his paintings that he was indeed a man humble and pure of heart, who, when the arts were beginning to abdicate their position as handmaids of the Church in order to minister to the pleasures of men, preserved his love for Christian tradition, and in earnest simplicity painted what he believed and venerated as he conceived and saw it in his meditations. There is no affectation, no seeking after novelties, no mixture of pagan ideas in his works."

Memling's contemporary, Dirk Bouts, deserves scarcely less praise, and Quentin Matsys is another of the genius painters of the time. The story of his rise from blacksmith to painter is only a good illustration, whether legendary or not, of the closeness of the mechanical arts, those of the goldsmith and the silversmith particularly, but of all the smiths, to the liberal arts of painting and sculpture. The divorce of these higher and lower arts from each other always leads to decadence, not alone in the mechanical, but also in the liberal arts. The goldsmith or silversmith in the Low Countries, in Italy, in Nuremberg, easily became a sculptor in the highest sense of the term, and not infrequently turned his attention successfully to other arts. It was an ideal condition, showing how deeply culture had penetrated, and whenever something of it at least does not exist the liberal arts are sure to be artificial and borrowed, not native and genuine.

Memling's successors in the Flemish tradition of painting maintained their master's distinction, and even when lacking in that genius which alone enables men to do great work did painting that is far above the mediocre, and that served to spread the spirit of culture among the people. Lucas van Leyden, in a short life of less than forty years, did some beautiful things that shall always keep his memory alive. Gerard David falls only short of the work of such great contemporaries as Memling himself. David's pupil, Moestart, nobly continues the tradition of his master. Michiel Coxcie and others do good work before the end of Columbus' Century, which, in a country less dowered with great artists than Flanders, would have secured them places of highest distinction in the history of national art.

The generation of Flemish painters after Memling who studied in Italy represent among them some great artists worthy to be mentioned even beside their Italian masters, though these are confessedly the great Renaissance artists. Justus of Ghent is the first of these, an actual contemporary of Memling and a man who not only learned from but also in turn deeply influenced the Italians with whom he was brought in contact. Jan van Mabuse-Gossaert, Bernard van Orley, Blondeel and Gerard David were touched by the spirit of the Italian Renaissance and its great painters, yet preserved the native fire of their genius and displayed national characteristics which have deservedly given them a place quite apart from the Italian schools. Some of their paintings are among those the world knows best and values most highly, and they have gained in prestige in later years as the knowledge and appreciation of Teutonic art has spread.

Great as was the distinction and achievement of the Low Countries, at this time it was not so far superior to Southern Germany as to eclipse its brilliancy. What Bruges was to the Low Countries, and especially Flanders as an art capital at the beginning of Columbus' Century, Nuremberg was to Southern Germany. The city well deserves the name of Northern Florence, for all the arts flourished luxuriantly and the monuments attest, even better than any traditions, how much was accomplished here for art. Her greatest artist in this, very like so many of his Italian contemporaries, was not limited in his powers of expression to any one narrow mode, for Albert D?rer was painter, designer, engraver, but also like Leonardo a mathematician, and like Michelangelo a writer. D?rer's place as a painter is too well known to need special description here. He is now acknowledged to be one of the world's greatest artists, worthy to be mentioned in the same breath even with his supremely great contemporaries, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Botticelli and Correggio. In recent years he has come to be more generally known. His pious pictures have a certain Teutonic literalness added to their mystical quality that gives them distinction.

He is one of the great group of cultured intellectual people who made Nuremberg so famous at this time. While his art has many essential German characteristics, it is much more than national, though it shows very well the high standard of excellence that the German painters of this time had attained. His visits to Italy and the Netherlands broadened his views, developed his artistic sense, refined his taste and did much for him, yet the essential German character of his painting and his absolute individuality as an artist remained. Some of his Madonnas are quite as charming in their way, though very different from the Italian, as those of the great Renaissance painters in the peninsula. His "Adoration of the Magi" will bear comparison with the masterpieces even of Italy and the Netherlands, and his Madonnas, though of German type, have a sweetness all their own. In his second period some of his painting at Venice shows how deeply he was influenced by the Venetian colorists and yet was never merely an imitator.

D?rer did fine work of real artistic quality, not only in painting, but also in wood engraving, and afterwards in engraving on copper. Prints from his woodcuts or copperplates still command high prices, and indeed it is probable that only those of Rembrandt are valued more highly. He brought these two modes of art to great perfection. He was a fine craftsman, as well as an artist, and both etching and wood engraving owe much to his inventive ability and handicraftsmanship.

As might be expected of this intimate friend of Wilibald Pirkheimer, he was a scholar as well as an artist, and we have from him three books, one on the proportions of the human figure, which shows how carefully he studied the essentials of his art; one on geometry and one on the art of fortification. Like Leonardo he felt his ability as an engineer, and like Raphael and Michelangelo was widely interested not only in every mode of art, but all the intellectual interests of his time. No more than the Italians he was not a narrow specialist in any sense of the word, and nothing shows so clearly as his career and achievements how much the spirit of genius was abroad at this time in Europe everywhere, lifting men up to heights of accomplishment that had scarcely been possible before.

Besides D?rer, the great painters of South Germany were the Holbeins, father and son. Hans Holbein the elder first came into prominence at Augsburg as a partner to his brother Sigmund, a painter, none of whose works have come down to us. His early works are nearly all on the Passion and show the influence of his studies of the Passion Plays, so frequently given all over South Germany at this time. Early in the sixteenth century he came under Italian influence and painted some pictures that, while naive and primitive, exhibit evidence of high artistic ability. His fame was eclipsed entirely by his son, Hans Holbein, known as the younger, though there is no doubt at all of the influence exerted by Holbein the father on the art of his period, and his sketchbooks are precious material for the biography and customs of his contemporaries.

Art was gradually being pushed out in the German countries, however, and above all there was no opportunity for religious painting, which used to form the chief source of income and of inspiration, as well as the principal resource of painters before this, as it continued to be in the Latin countries. Besides, the religious revolution had come to occupy men's minds with disputes about religious subjects, and interest in art further declined. How well Holbein could have painted religious pictures is very well illustrated by the famous altar-piece of the Burgomaster Meyer, with his wives and children, in prayer before the Blessed Virgin. Few Madonnas are more impressive than this, but now the beautiful Mother of God was no longer an object of reverence. Holbein could get no further commissions of this kind, and was pitifully reduced, it is said, even to the painting of escutcheons for a living. Erasmus, whose portrait he had so often made in many different positions, compassionated his poverty and lack of occupation and sent him with a note of introduction to Sir Thomas More. More appreciated him at once, had him paint his own portrait and those of his family and engaged the interest of the nobility in him.

In the School of Valentia, Juan de Juanes is famous for his religious pictures. His vigor and variety of invention are wonderful and his coloring is splendid. His numerous faces of Christ were unrivalled, the best perhaps being that with the Sacred Cup. His pencil was wholly dedicated to religion, and, according to the tradition, he habitually communicated and confessed before taking a sacred picture. He had two daughters, Dorothea and Marguerita, who are famous in the history of Spanish art, typical, illustrious women of the Spanish Renaissance.

SCULPTURE IN ITALY

Columbus' Century was destined to see the creation of some of the finest sculpture since the time of the Greeks. Probably in no department of art does this period stand out as so surely surpassing any other period of modern times, or indeed any time except the Periclean, as in its power to furnish great examples of plastic art. Triumphs of sculpture were accomplished in every medium--stone, bronze, terra-cotta, wood and the precious metals. The eve of the century saw the making of some very great sculptures, which portended the wonderful development that was to come. It was in 1447 that Ghiberti completed the second pair of doors for the Baptistery at Florence, which have been the admiration of the world ever since. After this it was easy to understand that there was no development of artistic expression in plastic work that might not be expected. All the expectations possible were realized in the succeeding hundred years.

Columbus' Century was ushered in with as great a triumph in sculpture and by the work of a master as great in his maturity, which came just then, as Fra Angelico was in painting. Fra Angelico, however, had been but little touched by the Renaissance spirit of classicism, while Donatello, the familiar name for Donato di Niccolo di Betti Pardi, whom the classic impulse was to carry ahead of all contemporary artists and indeed to make a model and a subject of study for all succeeding students of sculpture, was born even before the close of the fourteenth century, but like so many of the distinguished artists of the Renaissance period, lived a long life of persistent work and great achievement, and the most important part of that work came after 1450.

His greatest triumph, the monument to Gatamelata, was set up in Padua in 1453. There are two equestrian statues that are conceded by all the world to be supreme works of art, and copies of which are to be found in many museums throughout our civilization. One of these is Donatello's "Gatamelata" and the other the "Colleoni," by Verrocchio, who was a disciple of Donatello. The earlier sculptor had seen some of the equestrian monuments of the Roman times and had wondered whether he could not imitate them, or at least accomplish the same purpose. Undaunted by the difficulties as men seem ever to have been at this time, he faced not only the problem of making the model that would express his ideas, but of putting it into the bronze form that would make it imperishable. He had to master all the problems of equine anatomy, but above all he had to make himself familiar with the details of the technique of the founders' art so as to master the process of casting so large a work absolutely in the round. Practically he had to discover a great many of these technical points for himself, and he had to invent methods of accomplishing his purpose. To most men at any time this would have seemed an almost impossible achievement. They would have been discouraged from attempting it. There were many simpler forms of his art that he might practise, and not take on his shoulders all the technics of the bronze foundry, but Donatello undisturbedly went on his way and accomplished his purpose.

There is nothing more interesting and at the same time nothing more characteristic of this period of discovery and a achievement--indeed, it is a worthy prelude to Columbus' Century--than the fact that the very first equestrian statue, made in the modern times when all the difficulties, material as well as artistic, were heaped up before the sculptor, is one of the greatest monuments of that kind in the world's history. Only the "Colleoni," made a half a century later, surpasses, if indeed that is to be conceded, yet this was the very first attempt. This is not so surprising, however, if one realizes the significance of other work of this time. Within a half a century of the invention of oil painting some of the greatest masterpieces of that mode came into existence; within less than half a century of the invention of printing, some of the most beautiful books that have ever been made were printed. There has been a tendency in our time, as a result of much discussion of evolution, to think that such triumphs of achievement come only after long evolution and as the climax of a prolonged process of development. On the contrary genius at any time in the world's history takes hold of a mode of expression for the first time and secures a triumph in it that will be the envy and admiration of all succeeding generations.

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