What I have advanced in the foregoing paragraphs is not meant for a polemic against the time-honoured division of Italian painters into local schools, but for a justification of my own proposed method of treatment. Having undertaken to deal with painting as the paramount art-product of the Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the leading characteristics of aesthetic culture in Italy, rather than to dwell upon its specific differences. The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to the general history of the art as developed in Tuscany and propagated by Tuscan influences.[122] In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediaeval Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. It was felt that much beside religious sentiment was worthy of expression. At the same time, about the year 1440, this process of secularisation was hastened by the influences of the classical revival, renewing an interest in the past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science. The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accurate delineation of actual things: good perspective, correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual motives. On the other hand they conceived an admiration for the fragments of the newly discovered antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, to prove that this abandonment of the religious sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline from good to bad, or to make the more or less of spiritual feeling in a painter's style the test of his degree of excellence; nor can we by any sophistries be brought to believe that the Popes of the fifteenth century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian arts. The truth is, that in the Church, in politics, and in society, the fifteenth century witnessed a sensible decrease of religious fervour, and a very considerable corruption of morality. Painting felt this change; and the secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism. Yet the art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has known--neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full accomplished art and science, human. After Italy, in the course of that century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting suffered from the general depression of the national genius. The great