In Umbria therefore, more than in most countries, the history of her art should be studied side by side with the history of the times in which it was produced, for the one was, as it were, the spiritual escape or reaction from the other. The art of Umbria was perhaps only another form of that spirit which produced the teaching of S. Francis. The first pictures of Perugia are full of man's best prayers, the earliest of them bear his stripes, in very few can we detect his wantonness or humour; and when we say that the later ones are imbued with man's weakness, or at least his sentimentality, we make a most apparent platitude. It is sufficient in this place to note that whatever the final faults of the school, it originated in a purpose that was pure--the purpose of men who strove to represent the very opposite of all that fury, blood, and passion peculiar to the time and place in which they lived and painted. To most people, therefore, who once have grasped these facts, there will be something sad, nay, even offensive, in the Pinacoteca at Perugia. Why, and for whom, were these purely religious paintings torn from their niches in the quiet churches, and hung up, side by side, in a glare of light on the walls of a gallery? How pale, and how sad they look, after all, the saints and the Marys, the angels and the holy Child, here on the bare grey walls. The thing has been said a hundred times before, but a friend at Perugia said it to us in a way we have never forgotten. He was a priest, and he loved his church. We were discussing together the present system of local picture galleries. His eyes grew dark. "Yes," he said, "it is as though they would tear a child from the breasts of its mother. The mother withers and dies, and the child dies too, without her care in the wilderness where they laid it." * * * * *