But although the allegorical element in the poetry, the art, and the festivals of Italy is superior both in good taste and in unity of conception to what we find in other countries, yet it is not in these qualities that it is most characteristic and unique. The decisive point of superiority[928] lay rather in the fact, that besides the personifications of abstract qualities, historical representatives of them were introduced in great number--that both poetry and plastic art were accustomed to represent famous men and women. The ‘Divine Comedy,’ the ‘Trionfi’ of Petrarch, the ‘Amorosa Visione’ of Boccaccio--all of them works constructed on this principle--and the great diffusion of culture which took place under the influence of antiquity, had made the nation familiar with this historical element. These figures now appeared at festivals, either individualised, as definite masks, or in groups, as characteristic attendants on some leading allegorical figure. The art of grouping and composition was thus learnt in Italy at a time when the most splendid exhibitions in other countries were made up of unintelligible symbolism or unmeaning puerilities. Let us begin with that kind of festival which is perhaps the oldest of all--the Mysteries.[929] They resembled in their main features those performed in the rest of Europe. In the public squares, in the churches, and in the cloisters extensive scaffolds were constructed, the upper story of which served as a Paradise to open and shut at will, and the ground-floor often as a Hell, while between the two lay the stage properly so called, representing the scene of all the earthly events of the drama. In Italy, as elsewhere, the biblical or legendary play often began with an introductory dialogue between Apostles, Prophets, Sibyls, Virtues, and Fathers of the Church, and sometimes ended with a dance. As a matter of course the half-comic ‘Intermezzi’ of secondary characters were not wanting in Italy, yet this feature was hardly so broadly marked as in northern countries.[930] The artificial means by which figures were made to rise and float in the air--one of the chief delights of these representations--were probably much better understood in Italy than elsewhere; and at Florence in the fourteenth century the hitches in these performances were a stock subject of ridicule.[931] Soon after Brunellesco invented for the Feast of the Annunciation in the Piazza San Felice a marvellous apparatus consisting of a heavenly globe surrounded by two circles of angels, out of which Gabriel flew down in a machine shaped like an almond. Cecca, too, devised the mechanism for such displays.[932] The spiritual corporations or the quarters of the city which undertook the charge and in part the performance of these plays spared, at all events in the larger towns, no trouble and expense to render them as perfect and artistic as possible. The same was no doubt the case at the great court festivals, when Mysteries were acted as well