Such motives for picture-making Florence of course shared with the entire Christian world. It remains to explain why she wanted more painting and better than any other mediæval city. She wanted more painting chiefly because of her exceptional civic pride and prosperity, she wanted better painting because she had moved ahead of the world towards finer, more passionate, and conscious experiences of life which the older painting was powerless to express. About the year 1200, a century before the time we are considering, there flourished two great religious leaders who gave to Christianity a new dignity and appeal. St. Dominic, with his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, endeavored to make Christianity more reasonable, St. Francis of Assisi endeavored to make it more heartfelt and compassionate. They founded two monastic orders with divergent yet harmonious aims. The Dominicans called men to a life of study and self-examination, enlisting the human reason to explain and justify the universe under the Christian scheme; the Franciscans called men to poverty, humility, and chastity, and service to the unfortunate. Between the two—one supplying the light of the reason and the other the light of the heart—they overcame heresies which had menaced both Christianity and civilization and roused the Church out of its dogmatic slumber. It was no longer enough for the Church to threaten. Men yielded to her now only on condition that their heads be convinced or their hearts touched. In Florence, where a rationalizing shrewdness and a real warm-heartedness singularly blended, the double appeal was irresistible. By and large the whole city either schematized with the Dominicans or slummed with the Franciscans. Here was urgent new matter requiring an art that could move and persuade. Together with this religious revival and the political and commercial progress we have noted, came a literary revival. Before the end of the 13th century such poets as Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante Alighieri had so reshaped the rude vulgar tongue that it became worthy of its Latin succession. The refinements of chivalric love came to Florence in melodious verse, and what the poets called the “sweet new style,” _il dolce stil nuovo_, in diction presaged a similar sweet new style of painting. Alongside of the poets, Brunetto Latini in the _Tesoro_ shows glimmerings of scientific interest, and Giovanni Villani lends substance and dignity to the work of the chronicler. Already the sculptors Nicola and Giovanni of neighboring Pisa had grasped the beauties respectively of classic sculpture and the noble intensity of that of the Gothic North. All this immensely increased that sum of fine thinking, feeling, and seeing which underlies all great art.