But, in the fifteenth century, a new spirit came into art; and with the work of Juan Sánchez de Castro the school of Seville may be said to begin. No knowledge has come down to us of his life; we know only that he was painting in Seville between 1454 and 1516. In his great fresco of “San Cristóbal,” that covers the wall near to the main door in the old Church of San Julian--alas! now spoiled by re-painting and by the subsequent rotting away of the plaster--we find a different, human, almost playful treatment of a sacred story. And for the first time in Seville, we see the special Spanish quality, characteristic of the whole school from this time to the time of Goya, of rendering a scene just as the painter supposed it might have happened. “A child’s dream of a picture,” Mr Arthur Symons has called it. San Cristóbal, many times the size of life, stretching from floor to ceiling, fills the whole picture; he leans upon a pine-staff as he supports the Child Christ upon his shoulders, who holds in his hands a globe of the world upon which the shadow of a cross has fallen. The other figures, the hermit and two pilgrims with staves and cloaks, are quite small; they reach just to the Saint’s knees. And this immense grotesque figure is painted in all seriousness, as a child might picture such a scene. To understand the sincerity of the Spanish painter, we must compare his work with that other fresco of “San Cristóbal,” painted, much later, by Perez de Alesio, which is in the Cathedral. The Italian picture is an attempt to illustrate a popular miracle, perfectly unconvincing; De Castro’s Saint compels us to accept and realise what the painter himself believed in. This is the difference between them.