The Umbrian School, unlike the Florentine, was distinctively provincial; painting was not centralised in any great capital, but flourished in small towns and retired valleys--in Perugia, Foligno, Borgo S. Sepolcro, S. Severino, Rimini (see 2118), etc. Hence the older traditions of Italian art held their ground, and the religious feeling of the Middle Ages survived long after it had elsewhere been superseded. This tendency was confirmed by the spirit of the district. The little townships of Umbria begirdle the Hill of Assisi, the hallowed abode of St. Francis, and were the peculiar seats of religious enthusiasm. Art followed the current of life, just as it did in Florence or Venice or Padua; and Umbria--"the Galilee," as it has been called, "of Italy"--thus produced a distinct type in painting, marked by a quality of sentimental pietism. The influence of Siena, whose artists worked at Perugia, must have made in the same direction, and it is interesting to notice in this room one picture of St. Catherine of Siena (249), and two of her namesake of Alexandria (693, 168). It is interesting, further, to notice how the "purist" style of landscape, identified with this pietistic art (see under 288), is characteristic of the district itself. "Whoever visits the hill-town of Perugia will be struck," says Morelli, "with two things: the fine, lovely voices of the women, and the view that opens before the enraptured eye, over the whole valley, from the spot where the old castle stood of yore. On your left, perched on a projecting hill that leans against the bare sunburnt down, lies Assisi, the birthplace of S. Francis, where first his fiery soul was kindled to enthusiasm, where his sister Clara led a pious life, and finally found her grave. Lower down, the eye can still reach Spello and its neighbouring Foligno, while the range of hills, on whose ridge Montefalco looks out from the midst of its gray olives, closes the charming picture. This is the gracious nook of earth, the smiling landscape, in which Pietro Perugino loves to place his chaste, God-fraught Madonnas, and which in his pictures, like soft music, heightens the mood awakened in us by his martyrs pining after Paradise" (_German Galleries_, p. 252). "All is wrought," says another writer, "into a quietude and harmony that seem eternal. This is one of the mysterious charms in the Holy Families of Raffaelle and of the early painters before him: the faces of the Madonnas are beyond the discomposure of passion, and their very draperies betoken an Elysian atmosphere which wind never blew" (_Letters of Edward FitzGerald_, i. 45). Such were the local circumstances of the art which, beginning with the almost grotesque pietism of Niccolò da Foligno (1107), led up to the "purist ideal" of Perugino and to the first manner of Raphael.