The religious feeling was a passion with them on a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament: it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation.

What was cold and sober would not satisfy the men of these two cities.

The Florentines, more justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impassioned impulse, less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, expressed themselves in art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity, its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human needs.

Therefore, Florentine influences determined the course of painting in Central Italy.
Therefore Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the fourteenth century, set his stamp upon the Lorenzetti.

The mystic painters of Umbria and Siena have their high and honoured place in the history of Italian art.