Although as a painter , Bronzino ( 1502-1572 ) cannot be compared with Andrea del Sarto , there is in his work a kind of obstinate adherence to the ideals of a Florence that was passing into history , a kind of stern dignity in spite of the falling standards of his day , that command our admiration and respect .sx With none of Leonardo's cynical insight into humanity , he gave to his portraits a grim vitality which is infinitely impressive ; and in his more fantastic exercises in design , such as the " Venus , Cupid , Folly and Time " in the London National Gallery , he displays a mastery both of form and of linear pattern reminiscent of the most elaborate achievements of Botticelli , the most plastic compositions of Michelangelo .sx Bronzino has been under-rated because his outlook is towards the past rather than the future .sx With a glorious past behind him , and a decadent and depressing future well within his view , he had every excuse ; at least he upheld the dignity of Florentine art beyond its day .sx It is impossible to follow here more than a very little way , the reactions of Florence upon the painting of the Lombard school .sx It has always been a puzzling question , why the formative influence in that most sentimental school should have been the most inhuman of all Florentines .sx The work of Leonardo in Milan was largely the outcome of his avoidance of the uncongenial atmosphere of a Florence deprived of such princely patrons as he needed to give scope to his art ; and we may perhaps be forgiven for observing that even so independent a mind as his was not above attuning its outlook to that of his new environment .sx It may almost seem like heresy to suggest that Leonardo the master learned anything from Milan ; but it is difficult to believe that the painter of the distorted fury of the " Battle of Anghiari " and of the sombre mystery of " Our Lady on the Knees of St. Anne " would ever have developed the power of sentimental appeal which informs the " Last Supper " and the " Madonna of the Rocks " in any other but Lombard surroundings .sx Therefore it is not surprising to find that Luini ( 1470-1533 ) , the greatest of all the Lombard painters , uses no more than the body of Leonardo's art , and that the soul of it is all that sweetness to which his master had only made concessions under stress of circumstance .sx Indeed , Luini , while he is wholly Italian in form , and Leonardesque at that , is remote from Florence and from Leonardo in sentiment , and only Italian by force of association .sx There is far more real affinity in his " Holy Family " in the Liechtenstein collection to Holbein's " Mayer Madonna , " than to any Florentine picture :sx and the colour-sense displayed in his " Burial of St. Catherine " in the Brera is nearer to that of Central Europe than of Tuscany , in all save the decorative instinct which controls it .sx Ambrogio di Predis ( 1459-1537 ) , on the other hand , is by very reason of the closeness of his association with Leonardo , a shadowy figure ; for he surrendered to the personality of the master so completely all that he brought of his own to the practice of his art , that we may well wonder whether it may not have been from him , a young painter when Leonardo arrived in Milan , that the latter took the first hints of the new form that his art , essentially the art of a courtier for all its greatness , must take in order to consolidate its position in its new home .sx However this may be , the school of Milan as a whole was never cohesive or deeply founded , but was subject to rapid and often puzzling modification by contact , now with Florence , now with Siena , and again with Verona and Venice , while retaining as its predominant characteristic the formula imposed upon it by Leonardo da Vinci , and , as it would seem , invented by him expressly to that end .sx The main stream of Florentine art , then , was deep and swift , but it flowed in a narrow channel .sx Its cross-currents were strong , but they were self-contained , and though for a time they might diverge , they came together in the end to swell the volume of a single tide .sx III .sx UMBRIAN SCHOOL .sx THE story of Umbrian painting begins in a faltering and spasmodic fashion .sx The great Umbrian focus of the art at Assisi had been , during the lifetimes of Cimabue , Giotto , Duccio and Simone Martini , the meeting ground of the artists of Florence and Siena , one might almost say , the battle-ground of their conflicting aims .sx There had been neither need nor room for local development in the immediate presence of these pioneers .sx The most that Umbria could do was to look on , and to store up for use to her own ends when the time should come , the knowledge brought to her from outside .sx The time seemed long in coming ; and when it came , it was from Siena rather than from Florence that Gentile da Fabriano ( 1360-1428 ) derived the main essentials of his craft .sx In his work , much though he was esteemed alike in Florence , Rome and Venice , there is no hint of Florentine sternness , but more than a little of the gaiety and facile emotion of Siena .sx There is , however , in every work of his that we know , an added quality , which he was perhaps the first of all Italian artists to develop into a dominant characteristic , namely a kind of naive but conscious grace , a tenderness of sentiment , which unlike that of Simone Martini , does not set our interest wandering from figure to figure , but welds and unifies his whole design .sx " The Adoration of the Magi " at Berlin is crammed with subsidiary incident , in which we can see plainly the influence of Martini :sx yet the movement of each figure leads us inevitably to the next , throughout the design , which is rigidly and arbitrarily decorative , for all its liveliness and variety of human interest .sx His work produced no immediate following in Umbria , and indeed had more direct influence in Venice than anywhere else in Italy :sx but by a roundabout route , it came back to Perugia with Benozzo Gozzoli twenty years after Gentile was dead , and found its indigenous interpreter in Gozzoli's Umbrian pupil Benedetto Bonfigli , who first among the Umbrians revealed a glimpse of the native instinct for aerial tone which neither Florentine nor Sienese could ever have taught him .sx Following closely the decorative tradition of closely packed forms and brilliant .sx variety of colours of which Gozzoli was a supreme exponent , he yet infused into all his colour a unity , a pellucid and penetrating overtone which even in an elaborately set narrative painting like the " Burial of St. Herculanus " or a piece of mystic symbolism in descriptive form , like the " Vision of St. Bernard , " gives a hint of naturalism unknown to painting before his day .sx Niccolo da Foligno ( 1430-1502 ) displays the naturalistic bent of Umbria in a different and less pleasing direction , for there is in his work a violence of feeling which amounts to brutality and infects his colour and drawing with a harshness that repels ; and indeed in all the earlier Umbrians there was an earnestness , a depth of sincerity , which shows itself in each one of them in some highly individual fashion .sx Fiorenzo di Lorenzo ( 1440-1521 ) , for example , though as a colourist he is often harsh and sombre , never lost his primary quality of command of tone , far exceeding that of the Florentines from whom he learned .sx First among these was Benozzo Gozzoli , and later , when he felt more forcibly the need for plastic expression , Antonio Pollaiuolo .sx He was , in fact , groping after a depth of atmospheric space in his composition , perhaps feeling that space alone could account naturally for the tonal relations of colours of which he was instinctively aware .sx Yet , side by side with him in Umbria , a Tuscan of the south , Piero della Francesca ( 1416-1492 ) was attacking in no groping fashion the problem of spherical , rather than atmospheric space in composition .sx A mathematician of genius and a profound theologian , he attacked the task with mathematical precision and with theological gravity .sx Subduing all decorative effect to secondary importance by keeping colour within a cool and unobtrusive scale , and reducing dramatic effect by the rigidity of his figure drawing , he concentrated his skill upon the arrangement of his composition in a scheme of apparently accidental curves so as to present to the subconscious vision the diagram of a hollow sphere drawn in perspective ; and by the gradation of tones and gradual suppression of detail in the distance of his picture , he actually succeeded in painting emptiness ; a notable example is the " Baptism in Jordan " ( London N.G. 665 ) , where the cold , silver-grey tone of the whole enhances the atmospheric effect of the linear design .sx This alliance between design and tone , in which the supreme quality .sx of Piero della Francesca lies , is , however , for the most part absent from the work of his immediate successors .sx For while Luca Signorelli ( 1441-1523 ) shows , even in a minor work like the " Adoration of the Shepherds , " in the London National Gallery , and far more in his terribly forcible " Last Judgment " at Orvieto , a remarkable command of spatial design , this is obscured , at any rate in the former work , by the harshness of colour and aggressive and restless plasticity of the figures , and by the lack of tonal control :sx and on the other hand , Melozzo da Forli ( 1438-1494 ) has a far more subtle and varied use of colour , and a tonal control which must surely be traceable to his close association with Justus of Ghent , who possessed a natural northern susceptibility to , and control of , colours ; yet in his work , spatial composition is very limited and timid , so that the rich colour lacks air and space to justify it .sx It was in the succeeding generation of the painters of Perugia , the pupils of Signorelli , Bernardino di Betto , called Pinturicchio ( 1454-1513 ) , and Pietro Perugino ( 1446-1523 ) that the Umbrian genius for spatial composition , with its ( to them ) natural corollary of atmospheric tone , found fuller and more consistent expression .sx Of these Pinturicchio , though by far the inferior in draughtsmanship , in spatial composition and in tonal unity , indeed , in all the technical essentials of his craft , yet represents the very highest point reached by any Umbrian artist in that peculiarly Umbrian genre , of which Gentile da Fabriano was the first exponent , namely that of gay and lively narrative .sx This is the outstanding quality of the humblest Umbrian painter of cassone-panels , and , though it would perhaps be irreverent to describe Pinturicchio as a cassone-painter in excelsis , we cannot help seeing in his frescoes of the " Life of Moses " in the Sistine Chapel ( 1482 ) , and even more in his last work , the story of Aeneas Silvius in the Cathedral Library at Siena , the counterpart in painting of the novello , the same romantic story-telling instinct , the same lightness of touch and happy knack of coherent design ; and this is mainly because , in spite of weak anatomy , dangerous prettiness of detail , and a tendency to overcrowding , he never fails to set his incidents in a world in which there is room for light and air .sx Nothing could be more dramatically unconvincing than his " Return of Ulysses " in the London National Gallery ( 911 ) , with its bone-less figures and simpering grace ; but since the whole spirit of the scene is .sx set , by the wide space of fantastic sea and land on to which the window of Penelope looks out , in the key of happy make-believe , we are fain to take it as it comes , and as it was meant to come , light-heartedly and with uncritical gratitude .sx It is a different matter when we come to Perugino .sx For here is a painter whom no difficulty of the craft need have dismayed ; who in his command over the subtle gradations of colour that distance lends , in his understanding of those principles of linear design that Piero della Francesca evolved , and in his mastery of decorative design in three dimensions , is unrivalled in all Italy ; yet he chooses , of set purpose , charm rather than dignity , grace rather than strength , even mannerism rather than style .sx