Next to the revival of ancient learning, and the progress of science, the age of Leo X. was indebted to the perfection of painting for its glory. It sprang from an inspiration as special, bore a character equally definite, and yet is invested with an excellence as absolute as that of Greek sculpture. It was a spiritual plant of the most delicate texture, the life of which may be defined as to its limits with the greatest precision. Our countryman, unfortunately now lost to literature, science, and art, Horace Binney Wallace, presents the facts in the following summary form: "The first bud broke through the hard rind of conventionality about the year 1220, and the scene of its first growth may be fixed at Siena; and by the year 1320 the germination of the whole trunk was decisively advanced. Cimabue and Giotto had spread examples of Art over all Italy. In the next century, till 1470, all the branches and sprays that the frame was to exhibit were grown; the leafage was luxuriantly full, and the buds of the flowers were formed, Memmi, the Gaddis, the Orgagnas, the Lippis, Massaccio, and, more than all, as relates to spiritual development, Fra Beato had lived and wrought. About 1470, the peerless blossom of Perfection began to expand, and continued open for seventy years, the brightest period of its glow being between 1500 and 1535. Its life declined and expired almost immediately. After 1570 nothing of original or progressive vitality was produced in Italy. Fra Bartolomeo had died in 1517; Leonardo in 1519; Raphael in 1520; Coreggio in 1534; Michael Angelo, at a great age, in 1563; Giorgione had died in 1511; John Bellini in 1516; Titian survived till 1576, at the age of 99; and Veronese died in 1588. The complete exhaustion of the vital force of Art, in the production of the great painters who were all living in 1500, is a noticeable fact. With the exception of the after-growth of the Bolognese school--of whom Dominicheno, Guido, and Guercino, alone are worth notice--which flourished between 1600 and 1660, nothing in the manner of the previous days, but false and feeble imitations appeared."