Francia was fortunate in contemporaries; the School of Squarcione had furnished him with style and form; the genius of Lionardo da Vinci, with effect and chiaroscuro; Pietro Vanucchi with arrangement if not composition, and though not beauty, with amenity of aspect; and Bellino with tone, breadth of drapery and colour. Ardour of mind, energy of application and dexterity, supplied the want of early practice, and we find him in the palace of Giov. Bentivoglio on a par with the most expert Frescanti conscribed from Ferrara and Modena, and soon after intrusted with the commission of painting the altar-piece of his chapel at S. Jacopo, a work of great subtlety of execution; though modestly inscribed "Opus Francia Aurificis," and a pledge of that superior style at which he aimed and in the sequel attained. If from what has been premised of Bolognese artists anterior to Cimabue, it is evident that the germs of art belong to their own soil, their claim to originality in the progress of style has been and still is matter of dispute between the champions of the Tuscan school and those of their own. The Florentines insist on having taught the Bolognese, what the Bolognese deny to have learnt from the Florentines.[170] As in a dispute of this kind, candour is often sacrificed to the fervour of patriotic vanity, and the obstinacy of local attachment, the real state of the question is better learnt from those monuments of the fourteenth century, which still remain scattered over Romagna or collected and more classically arranged in Bologna itself. Among all these some specimens will be found evidently Greek, others as evidently Giottesque; some in a Venetian style, and not a few in a manner peculiar to Bologna only. These have a body of colour, a taste in perspective, a mode of design in figures, and a choice of forms and hues in draperies, which no other school practised. From all which it appears, that if Giotto during his stay at Bologna raised pupils, and formed imitators, his own school had no influence on, nor dislodged, that aboriginal one which continued to disseminate and to improve the principles imbibed from the antique mosaics and the painters of miniature. FOOTNOTES: [167] Malvasia. [168] "Floret item nunc Romæ Jacobus Bononiensis, qui Trajani Columnæ picturas omnes ordine delineavit, magna omnium admiratione, magnoque periculo circum machinis scandendo."--V. Raphaelis Volaterrani Anthropologia, p. 774. A. ed. 1603. fol. [169] "Unum apud modernos reperio, de quo apud antiquos nulla extat memoria, de incisoribus seu sculptoribus in argento; quæ sculptura Niellum appellatur. Virum cognosco in hoc celeberrimum et summum, nomine Franciscum Bononiensem, aliter Franza, qui adeo in tam parvo orbiculo seu argenti lamina, tot homines, tot animalia, tot montes, arbores, castra ac tot diversa ratione situque posita figurat seu incidit, quod dictu ac visu mirabile apparet."--Camillo Leonardi, Speculo Lapidum, lib. iii. c. 2.