CHAPTER IV.
PAINTING Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy--Florence and Venice -- Classification by Schools--Stages in the Evolution of Painting--Cimabue -- The Rucellai Madonna--Giotto--His widespread Activity--The Scope of his Art--Vitality--Composition--Colour--Naturalism--Healthiness--Frescoes at Assisi and Padua--Legend of S.Francis--The Giotteschi--Pictures of the Last Judgment--Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel--Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa--Dogmatic Theology--Cappella degli Spagnuoli--Traini's "Triumph, of S.Thomas Aquinas"-- Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco--Sala della Pace at Siena--Religious Art in Siena and Perugia--The Relation of the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance.
It is the duty of the historian of painting to trace the beginnings of art in each of the Italian communities, to differentiate their local styles, and to explain their mutual connections.

For the present generation this work is being done with all-sufficient thoroughness and accuracy.[118] The historian of culture, on the other hand, for whom the arts form one important branch of intellectual activity, may dispense with these detailed inquiries, and may endeavour to seize the more general outlines of the subject.

He need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities to priority, nor hamper his review of national progress by discussing the special merits of the several schools.

Still there are certain broad facts about the distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is necessary to bear in mind.

However much we may desire to treat of painting as a phase of national and not of merely local life, the fundamental difficulty of Italian history, its complexity and variety, owing to the subdivisions of the nation into divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowledged.