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 picked up his way of painting in Italy. Certainly he and
other Venetians and Italians about this time improved their technical
methods as the Van Eycks had done, and this picture is an early example
of that more brilliant fashion of painting. There is here a Flemish
love of detail. The Italian painters had been more accustomed to
painting upon walls than the Flemings, for the latter had soon
discovered that a damp northern climate was not favourable to the
preservation of wall-paintings. Fresco does not admit of much detail,
as each day's work has to be finished in the day, before the plaster
dries. Thus, a long tradition of fresco painting had accustomed the
Italian painters to a broad method of treatment, which they maintained
to a certain extent even in their panel pictures. But in our St. Jerome
we see a wealth of detail unsurpassed even by John van Eyck.

One needs a magnifying-glass to see everything there is to be seen
in the landscape through the window on the left. Besides the city with
its towers and walls and the mountains behind, there is a river in
the foreground where two little people are sitting in a boat. Observe
every tiny stone in the pavement, and every open page of the books
on the shelves. Here, too, is breadth in the handling. Hold the book
far away from you, so that the detail of the picture vanishes and only
the broad masses of the composition stand out. You still have what
is essential. The picture is one in which Italian feeling and sentiment
blend with Flemish technique and love of little things. There has
always been something of a mystery about the picture, and you must
not be surprised some day if you hear it asserted that Antonello did
not paint it at all. Such changes in the attributions of unsigned
paintings are not uncommon.

One of the greatest pioneer artists of the fifteenth century was Andrea
Mantegna of Padua in the north of Italy. More than any other painter
of his day, he devoted himself to the study of ancient sculpture, even
to the extent of sometimes painting in monochrome to imitate the actual
marble. Paintings by him, which look like sculptured reliefs, are in
the National Gallery; and at Hampton Court is a series of cartoons
representing the Triumph of Julius Caesar, in which the conception
and the handling are throughout inspired by old Roman bas-reliefs.
In other pictures of his, the figures look as though cast of bronze,
for he was likewise influenced by the sculptors of his own day,
particularly by the Florentine Donatello, one of the geniuses of the
early Renaissance. Mantegna's studies of form in sculpture made him
an excellent draughtsman. Strangely enough, it was this very severe
artist who was, perhaps, the first to depict the charm of babyhood.
Often he draws his babes wrapped in swaddling clothes, with their
little fingers in their mouths, or else in the act of crying, with
their eyes screwed up tight, and their mouths wide open. Such a
combination of hard sculpturesque modelling with extreme tenderness
of feeling has a charm of its own.

We have now just one more picture of a sacred subject to look at, one
of the last that still retains much of the old beautiful religious
spirit of the Middle Ages. The painter of it, Sandro Botticelli, a
Florentine, in whom were blended the piety of the Middle Ages and the
intellectual life of the Renaissance, was a very interesting man, whose
like we shall not find among the painters of his own or later days.
He was born in 1446, in Florence, the city in Italy most alive to the
new ideas and the new learning. Its governing family, the Medici, of
whom you have doubtless read, surrounded themselves with a brilliant
society of accomplished men, and adorned their palaces with the finest
works of art that could be produced in their time. The best artists
from the surrounding country were attracted to Florence in the hope
of working for the family, who were ever ready to employ a man of
artistic gifts.

In such an atmosphere an original and alert person like Botticelli
could not fail to keep step with the foremost of his day. His fertile
fancy was charmed by the revived stories of Greek Mythology, and for
a time he gave himself up to the painting of pagan subjects such as
the Birth of Venus from the Sea, and the lovely allegory of Spring
with Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces. He was one of the early artists
to break through the old wall of religious convention, painting frankly
mythological subjects, and he did them in an exquisite manner all his
own.

The true spirit of beauty dwelt within him, and all that he painted