irresistible force of their onset and their calm youthful beauty through the mailed ranks of the Sardinian pagans.  Spinello was essentially a warlike painter; among the best of his compositions may be named the series of pictures from the history of the Venetian campaign against Frederick Barbarossa.[158] It is a pity that the war of liberation carried on by the Lombard communes with the Empire should have left but little trace on Italian art; and therefore these paintings of Spinello, in addition to their intrinsic merit, have rare historical interest.  Delighting in the gleam of armour and the shock of speared warriors, Spinello communicated something of this fiery spirit even to his saints.  The monks of Samminiato near Florence employed him in 1388 to paint their newly-finished sacristy with the legend of S. Benedict.  In the execution of this task Spinello displayed his usual grandeur and vigour, treating the grey-robed brethren of Monte Cassino like veritable champions of a militant Church.  When he died in 1410, it might have been truly said that the flame of the torch kindled by Giotto was at last extinguished.

The student of history cannot but notice with surprise that a city famed like Siena for its vanity, its factious quarrels, and its delicate living, should have produced an almost passionately ardent art of piety.[159] The same reflections are suggested at Perugia, torn by the savage feuds of the Oddi and Baglioni, at warfare with Assisi, reduced to exhaustion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable in the history of painting as the head-quarters of the pietistic Umbrian school.  The contradiction is, however, in both cases more apparent than real.  The people both of Siena and Perugia were highly impressible and emotional, quick to obey the promptings of their passion, whether it took the form of hatred or of love, of spiritual fervour or of carnal violence.  Yielding at one moment to the preachings of S. Bernardino, at another to the persuasions of Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the character of being fiends or angels according to the temper of their leaders; while Siena might boast with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine and nurtured Beccadelli.  The religious feeling was a passion with them on a par with all the other movements of their quick and mobile temperament:  it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation.  What was cold and sober would not satisfy the men of these two cities.  The Florentines, more justly balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impassioned impulse, less capable of feeling the rapt exaltation of the devotee, expressed themselves in art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity, its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human needs.  Therefore, Florentine influences determined the course of painting in Central Italy.  Therefore Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the fourteenth century, set his stamp upon the Lorenzetti.  The mystic painters of Umbria and Siena have their high and honoured place in the history of Italian art.  They supply an element which, except in the work of Fra Angelico, was defective at Florence; but to the Florentines was committed the great charge of interpreting the spirit of Italian civilisation in all its branches, not for the cloister only, or the oratory, but for humanity at large, through painting.