Hence the study I intend to offer you this season, of the history of painting in Italy. I shall attempt to lay before your eyes the mystic _milieu,_ in which appeared Giotto and Beato Angelico, and to this end I shall read passages from the poets and legendary writers, containing the ideas entertained by the men of those days concerning happiness, misery, love, faith, paradise, hell, and all the great interests of humanity. We shall find documentary evidence in the poetry of Dante, of Guido Cavalcanti, of the Franciscans, in the Golden Legend, in the Imitation of Jesus Christ, in the Fioretti of St. Francis, in the works of historians like Dino Campagni, and in that vast collection of chroniclers by Muratori, which so naively portray the jealousies and disturbances of the small Italian republics. After this I shall attempt to place before you in the same manner the pagan _milieu_ which a century and a half later produced Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael and Titian, and to this end I shall read, either from the memoirs of contemporaries--Benvenuto Cellini for instance--or from the diverse chronicles kept daily in Rome and in the principal Italian cities, or from the despatches of ambassadors, or, finally, from the descriptions of fêtes, masquerades, and civic receptions, which are remarkable fragments, displaying the brutality, sensuality, and vigor of society, as well as the lively poetic sentiment, the love of the picturesque, the great literary sentiment, the decorative instincts, and the passion for external splendor which at that time are seen as well among the people and the ignorant crowd as among the great and the lettered.