It is not improbable that this and similar works, besides introducing a new element into the semi-Byzantine practice of the Venetian school, may have spread to Albert Durer and other Germans, who long after visited that "Ruler of the waters and their powers," an influence carried by them to Nuremberg and Cologne, to enrich the already gaudy tendencies of ultramontane taste. But Gentile da Fabriano possesses another claim upon the student of early painting, hitherto inadequately noticed. To the lessons of his father, a learned mathematician, he may have owed the linear perspective which, in many of his productions, anticipated the improvements of Piero della Francesca. This is observable in the Zeno picture, and still more in a small predella in my possession, where his favourite theme, the Epiphany, is completed by a background accurately laid out in lines and compartments, such as we see in the Dutch gardens of the seventeenth century. But to this question we must return. Among the artists who maintained in Umbria the influences left by Ottaviano and Gentile, two were of special merit, NICOLÒ ALUNNO, of Foligno, and BENEDETTO BONFIGLI, of Perugia. Their works have been often confounded, but with the latter only have we to do, for, besides being nearer to Gentile both in age and in manner, he is generally considered as the master of PIETRO PERUGINO,[*140] and thus forms a link in the artistic chain which we are endeavouring to establish, through the best Umbrian painters, from ODERIGI OF GUBBIO to RAFFAELE OF URBINO. Of Bonfigli there are several interesting and well-preserved specimens in his native town, dated about 1466, but it must be owned that none of the earliest known works of Perugino exhibit much trace of his style. These, however, are all supposed posterior to Pietro's first visit to Florence, where his ideas must have undergone vast development from the examples of Masaccio and other masters, who there formed a galaxy of talent about the middle of the fifteenth century.[*141] In that city he formed his early friendship with Leonardo da Vinci, which Sanzi says was cemented by parity of age as of affection; and it is singular how little such sympathy can be traced in their genius or works. When, on the other hand, we contrast the placid features which Vannucci uniformly limned, rarely ruffled by sorrow, never clouded by sin, with the furious mien and restless energy of Michael Angelo's creations, we may well credit Vasari's story of their quarrel, and can account for the scrimp justice accorded to the painter of Città della Pieve by his Florentine biographer. They pretend not, indeed, to the bold character of Signorelli, nor even to the severity of Mantegna, or Piero della Francesca; but those who criticise them as stiff, timid, and monotonous, in contrast with the performances of the next generation, would arrive at more just conclusions did they include in the comparison those painters who had preceded him, and whose example