The great step once taken, the new speech once broadly fixed, and the new art-ideal once adumbrated by masters, both literature and art could in differing sort flourish under the regimen of more or less propitious princes; but not so as to alter the truth just stated. What could best of all thrive was art. Architecture, indeed, save for one or two great undertakings, can hardly be said to have ever outgone the achievement of the republican period; and painting was first broadly developed by public patronage; but it lay in the nature of the case that painting could find ample economic furtherance under the princes and under the Church. For the rule of the princes was not, save in one or two places at a time, a tyranny of the kind that destroys all individuality; the invention of printing, and the general use of Latin, now maintained a constant interaction of thought throughout all Europe, checked only by the throttling hand of the Church; and the arts of form and colour, once well grown, are those which least closely depend on, though they also thrive by, a free all-round intellectual life. The efficient cause of the great florescence of Italian art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was economic--the unparalleled _demand_ for art on the part alike of the cities, the Church, the princes, and the rich. From the tenth to the thirteenth century the outstanding economic phenomenon in Italy is the growth of wealth by industry and commerce. In the same period, Italian agriculture so flourished that by the fifteenth century Italy would on this ground alone have ranked as the richest of European countries.[573] From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century the outstanding economic fact is the addition to this still increasing wealth of the foreign revenues of the Church.[574] In the sixteenth century all three sources of wealth are almost simultaneously checked--that from agriculture through the miserable devastation wrought by the wars[575] and by the Spanish and papal rule; and then it is that the great art period begins to draw to its close. While the revenue of the Church from the northern countries was sharply curtailed by the Reformation, which in rapid succession affected Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian States, the trade of Italy began to be affected through the development of the new sea route round the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese; and though that gradual change need not have brought depression speedily, the misrule of Leo X, raised to an unprecedented secular power, and the crowning blow of the Spanish Conquest, following upon the other and involving government by Spanish methods, were the beginning of the end of Italian greatness.