It would add little to our survey of Umbria to dwell on Ottaviano Nelli at Urbino, a gently vivacious story-teller; nor yet on those early painters at Camerino and San Severino who tinged the softer native style with the splendid severity of the early Venetian manner. I pass their works with regret, for they are often lovely in their frank dependence on greater spirits. In a general survey the middle years of the fifteenth century in Umbria show rather little to attract us until the rise of Pietro Perugino. He emerges in an artistic world dominated in the Tiber Valley by the Florentine, Gozzoli, and beyond the mountains by Carlo Crivelli and the Vivarini. Such predecessor of Perugino as Benedetto Bonfigli of Perugia need not detain us. He had learned a little, a very little, from the Florentine, Domenico Veneziano, paints Madonnas with a modest ideality; and narratives, the life of St. Ercolano in the Communal Palace of Perugia, with abundant and muddled detail, after the fashion of Gozzoli and Domenico di Bartolo. His _bottega_ was a factory of those quaint and often terrible religious banners, Figure 171, which the devout Umbrians carried processionally to avert the recurrent plague. We need not dwell upon Perugino’s alleged master, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, whose ugly and emphatic draughtsmanship derives from Verrocchio and the Pollaiuoli. We may best appreciate Perugino’s extraordinary originality by considering contemporaries who came up with equal advantages. Lorenzo di San Severino exemplifies the usual Umbrian blend of Gozzoli and Venetian influences. And in such a picture as the Enthroned Madonna, Figure 172, in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, he attains an ideality of feeling and a beauty of workmanship of the most refreshing sort. This picture must have been painted about 1490. It may represent the high mark reached in the Marches towards the end of the century—may thus dispense us from considering such inherently charming painters as Girolamo da Camerino and his fellow townsman Giovanni Boccatis. [Illustration: FIG. 171. Bontigli Plague Banner. The Virgin protecting her Devotees from plague Shafts hurled by Christ.—_Chiesa del Gonfalone, Perugia._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 172. Lorenzo di San Severino. Madonna and Saints.—_Cleveland, O._ ]