From the earliest days of the revival of Italian painting the city of Bologna was distinguished for the cultivation of art, and could boast a regular succession of native painters. The names of several of these men have been preserved by old writers, and we hear of a Guido, a Ventura, and Ursone, who flourished in the thirteenth century. But the honour of having been the real founder of the school is ascribed by the historian Malvasia to a miniaturist known by the name of Franco Bolognese, who lived in the time of Dante and Giotto. Since, however, none of his works have come down to the present day, we have no opportunity of studying his style, and all that we know is that he was a pupil of the miniaturist Oderisio da Gubbio, and is said by Dante to have eclipsed his master in the same way that Giotto surpassed Cimabue. [Illustration: FRANCESCO RAIBOLINI.] When Virgil and Dante meet Oderisio expiating the sin of pride in purgatory, he tells them mournfully that the pictures which Franco now paints are fairer than his own, and that the honour once his now belongs to his scholar. So it has been in Dante’s own city of Florence, where once Cimabue held undisputed possession of the field, and now the fame is all Giotto’s. For what after all is the voice of earthly fame? Nothing but an idle breath of wind that blows first from one quarter, then from another, ever fitful and inconstant. But if Franco Bolognese’s only hope of immortality rests on Dante’s noble lines, the works of his pupils are still to be seen in Bologna, and afford us some idea of native art in these early times. Chief among them was Vitale, who painted in the first half of the fourteenth century, and whose few remaining pictures are marked by a softness and delicacy of workmanship which reveal the Umbrian origin of the school of Gubbio. A “Madonna and Angels,” painted by him in the year 1320 for the ancient church of the Madonna del Monte, and now preserved in the Gallery of Bologna, has a sweetness and humility of expression which approaches contemporary Sienese art, and the faces of his virgins are not unworthy precursors of Francia’s Madonna. The same manner was further developed in the paintings of his best scholar, Lippo Dalmasii, whose virgins acquired so wide a reputation as to win for him the surname of “Lippo delle Madonne.” This artist, who lived at the close of the fourteenth century, and painted between 1376 and 1410, was held in universal respect for the holiness of his life and character. His devout habits are recorded by Malvasia, who tells us that, before commencing a picture of the Virgin, he invariably spent the night in prayer and fasting, and received communion on the morning of the day itself. In his lifetime he was the most popular artist of Bologna, and his pictures were so much in request that he could scarcely paint fast enough to supply the demand. “No family was considered rich in Bologna,” says Malvasia, “which did not possess one of his Madonnas.”