There is perhaps no gallery in Europe as single-minded--as devoted to one set of men--as the gallery at Perugia. In passing through its separate rooms one feels none of that painful sense of clash and strain produced by a mixture of different schools, which haunts one in so many collections of statues or of pictures; and the most tired and indifferent traveller will feel something soothed and softened in his brain before he turns his back upon the quiet sacred pictures of the Umbrian masters. In no land perhaps, and in no school of art, was the feeling of the painters more purely and more absolutely _religious_ than in the land of Umbria. The saints were painted for places where saints were worshipped; the Christs have the love of the Father in their faces; the Marys are Mothers of pity and of grace; the bishops have renounced the ways of earth--their faces are calm and grey beneath their mitres. And the Umbrian angels are crowned with roses, but they are the roses of Paradise, and not the flowers of earth and of her banquets. Think of the galleries of Venice, of Bonifazio's Dives, and the glorious women of Titian; think of the Roman collections, of Bologna and Guercino; nay, even think of the later art of Florence, and then come back to these calm Umbrian masters. The gap is wide; the one is full of the passion and splendour of earth, the other of the sentiment of heaven. In M. Rio's chapters on the Umbrian school (_l'Art Chrétien_, vol. ii.), he dwells at length on the purely spiritual tendency of the Umbrian school, and to enforce this he points out two of its most remarkable characteristics; firstly he remarks that the Umbrian painters rarely painted portraits, and secondly, he gives an account of one of their chief products, namely, the painting of the _gonfalone_ or banner.