colour which glows even through the dirt of centuries. In the Sta. Maria Nuova of Fano are preserved two of Perugino's finest works, the Annunciation, and the Madonna enthroned between six saints, exhibiting all the qualities of his best time, with less timidity than belongs to his manner. The latter was executed in 1490, and the predella had been considered equal to Raffaele, who of course was then too young for such an undertaking. Such are some of the remaining pictures which must have influenced taste and art in the duchy. The catalogue is far from complete, for in the obscure villages may still be discovered altar-panels of scarcely inferior importance, besides not a few transported thence to Milan, Berlin, and other galleries. We owe to Lord Lindsay some very interesting views on the influence of early Teutonic art beyond the Alps, a subject long overlooked and still far from exhausted.[200] Among its masters no celebrity equals that of Jean Van Eyck. He was not only _capo-scuola_ in the Low Countries and inventor of a new method and vehicle of painting, but was the first to introduce that "feeling for nature and domestic sentiment" which, subordinate at the outset to religious delineation, has continued, through many phases, and for the most part with strictly naturalist aims, to characterise the Flemish pencil. The fame of his mechanism spread into Italy, and Vasari speaks of a bath scene being sent by him to Duke Federigo of Urbino. This was, however, probably the same work described as belonging to Cardinal Ottaviani by Facio, who wrote about 1456. In a room lighted by a single lamp, a group of nude females issued from the bath, an aged beldame, their attendant, bathed in perspiration, their thirsty dog lapping water. A mirror accurately gave back the scene, reflecting the profile of the one whose figure was turned from the spectator. Without, was elaborate and far-spreading scenery, with men, horses, castles, hamlets, groves, plains, and mountains, dexterously graduating away as the evening shadows fell. Keeping in view the state of art at that time, this painting, of which all further trace mysteriously vanishes, must have exercised an important influence. The borrowed illumination, the mirror reflections, the nude forms, the heated atmosphere detected by its physical effects on animal life, the minutely pencilled landscape, the delicately receding perspective, were all more or less innovations in Italy, apart from the colour and surface produced by the new process. [Footnote 200: _Sketches of the History of Christian Art_, Letter VIII., especially part II., §§ 1, 2, 4, and part III., § 6.]