personal experience and actions, secure of themselves as rooted in the same interests, without lamentation and without yearning[339]. When we have grasped this trait of happy independence and freedom of the soul in love we shall understand the character of the greatest Italian painters. It is in this freedom that they are masters of the detail of expression, and situation. On the wings of this tranquillity of soul they can maintain their sovereignty over form, beauty, and colour. In their most defined presentation of reality and character, while remaining wholly on the earth and often only producing portraits, or appearing to produce such, what we have are pictures of another sun, another spring. They are roses which are equally heavenly blossoms. And, consequently, we find that in their beauty we do not have merely beauty of form, we do not have only the sensuous unity of soul impressed on sensuous corporeal shapes; we are confronted with this very trait of reconciled Love in every mode, feature, and individuality of character. It is the butterfly, the Psyche[340], which in the sunlight of its heaven, even hovers round stunted flowers[341]. It is only by virtue of this rich, free, and rounded beauty that they are able to unfold the ideals of the antique art's more recent perfection. Italian art has, however, not immediately and from the first attained to such a point of perfection; it had in truth a long road to traverse before it arrived there. And yet, despite this, the purity and innocence of its piety, the largeness of the entire conception, the unassuming beauty of form, this intimate revelation of soul[342], are frequently and above all in the case of the old Italian masters most conspicuous where the technical elaboration is still wholly incomplete. In the previous century it was fashionable to depreciate these earlier masters, and place them on one side as clumsy, dull, and barren[343]. It is only in more recent times that they have been once more rescued from oblivion by savants and artists; but the wonder and imitation thus awakened has run off into the excess of a preference which tends to deny the advances of a further development in mode of conception and presentment, and can only lead astray in the opposite direction. In drawing the reader's more close attention to the more important phases in the development of Italian art up to this period of its fullest perfection, I will only briefly emphasize the following points which immediately concern the characterization of the essential aspects of painting and its modes of expression.