Besides the works which his native city contained, Raphael doubtless had had opportunities of seeing the productions of Andrea Luigi di Assisi, called Ingegno, of Niccolò di Fuligno, and other painters of the school of Umbria. Their robust style of colour, which was somewhat modified by Perugino and Pinturicchio, is occasionally to be traced in Raphael’s early works. There was another quality which Perugino, in his best time, possessed in common with other painters of his province, and which may be said generally to characterize the school of Umbria. This was an intensity of expression in sacred subjects indicating a deep religious feeling; and it is so striking in the best productions of the artist last named, that it has been considered sufficient of itself to prove the orthodoxy of his creed, which Vasari had called in question. The impulse was probably derived from Assisi, where some of the earliest Italian masters had left specimens of their powers, and the source was the doctrine of St. Francis. The history and legends of this saint (who died in 1226), frequently exercised the pencil of the early Italians, even to the danger of causing Bible subjects to be neglected, from the time of Giotto to that of Angelico da Fiesole: but the chief influence on the school above-mentioned is apparent rather in the treatment than in the subject; it is to be recognised in a certain subdued earnestness of expression, allied to the severe tenets of the saint of Assisi, and exhibiting religion rather in its suffering than in its triumphant character. This tendency received an additional impulse from the works which Taddeo di Bartolo of Siena had left in Perugia and other parts of Umbria early in the fifteenth century. The painters most remarkable for the quality alluded to were Niccolò Alunno, called Niccolò di Fuligno, and Pietro Perugino; but the same feeling had extended itself to Francia in Bologna. The taste of the Florentine painters on the other hand, with the single exception of Angelico da Fiesole, had long taken another direction: their pictures of this time abound in portraits; the saints and Madonnas of the school, those for instance of Domenico Ghirlandajo, seem to have been taken from common nature, and are seldom inspired with that sanctity of expression so frequent and so remarkable in the painters above-named. In later times, the painters of the various Italian schools, who were supposed to copy nature with too little selection, were called _naturalisti_, and, at the period alluded to, Florence may be considered comparatively the seat of this kind of imitation; a tendency greatly owing, it appears, to the introduction of early Flemish pictures, in which portraits were frequent, and in which the back-ground and accessories were treated with an attention new to the Italian painters.