In these first years of the Sevillian school, when art was sincere and young, many pictures were painted, all strong work, all interesting, in lesser or greater measure, to the student, even if not to the art lover, as showing the growth of a national style. In many cases the names of the artists are unknown; no painter has left much record of himself. These pictures, which may be recognised very readily, are found in the Museo de la Merced, in the Cathedral, and still more in the churches, the true museums of Seville. But fashion in art changes, and the sixteenth century witnessed the manifestation of a new mood in painting, the advent to Spain of the Italian influences of the Renaissance. This is not the place to speak of the blight which fell upon art. The distinctively Italian schools were only an influence of evil in Spain, and the inauguration of the new manner was the birth of a period of great artistic poverty. The main desire of the sixteenth-century painters was, as it were, to wipe the artistic slate. All pictures painted in the old style were repudiated as barbarous, cast aside as an out-of-date garment. The country became overrun by third-rate imitators of the Italian grand style, of Michael Angelo, of Raphael and his followers. The decorations, as you can still see them, of the Escorial, may be taken as typical of Italian art as it was transplanted into Spain. All national art that was not Italian in its inspiration was looked upon as worthless. Yet, be it remembered, that the Spanish painters, more perhaps than the painters of any other school, could imitate and absorb the art of others without degenerating wholly into copyists. The temper of the nation was strong. Even now it was not so much a _copying_ of Italian art, rather it was an unfortunate blending of style which took away for a time the dignity and strength which is the beauty of Spanish painting. Thus, Peter van Kempeneer, a Flemish painter, known better in Spain as Pedro Campaña, who, strangely enough, was the first to bring the Italian influence to Seville, was inspired alternately by the Northern and Italian styles; and in such a picture as his famous “Descent from the Cross,” still in the Sacristía Mayor of the Cathedral, with its crude colour and extravagant action, we find him--in an effort, it is said, to imitate Michael Angelo--being more Spanish than the Spaniards. Indeed, this picture, which made such strong appeal to Murillo that he chose to rest beneath it in death, gives us a very curious, left-handed fore-vision, as it were, of the marvellous work of Ribera. In the large altar-piece, of many compartments, of the Capilla del Mariscal in the Cathedral, the first picture painted by Campaña, when, in 1548, he came to Seville, we see him a realist in the portraits of the donors, painted with admirable truth; but in the “Purification of the Virgin,” the scene that fills the lower compartment of the altar, he is Italian and