very slight, and it is scarcely remarkable that his influence was not more strongly felt. Petruccio Ubaldini, who has been mentioned before, was both an illuminator and painter of miniatures at the court. The English miniaturists, however, inclined rather to the French and Flemish schools, even where in other respects they felt the Italian influence. Isaac Oliver, for instance, one of whose drawings in the northern Italian style is reproduced, was quite un-Italian in his miniatures, and the same was true of his master, Nicholas Hilliard.

A taste for art was slowly growing in England, though not much proof of this now remains.1 Sir Philip Hoby was counted by Titian among his friends. Constable also alluded to Raphael and Michelangelo in his sonnets. Richard Haydocke, in his well-known translation of Lomazzo's Art of Painting, greatly deplored the English lack of artistic feeling and the alleged decay of the arts, the cause of which he ascribed largely to the fact that the purchaser would not pay well for the work of art, and in consequence the artist would not do his best. Haydocke's effort was to induce a cultivated class of patrons who might encourage art. From his words it is evident that the English were then beginning to appreciate painting. Previously there had been but few illustrations of this. In the reign of Henry the Seventh, it is true, the Duke of Urbino had sent over as a gift to that mon

1 For list of contemporary English painters, vide Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598, p. 287.

2 Vide p. 143.

arch a small picture by Raphael1 of St. George slaying the dragon. Presents of similar nature were made from time to time. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, for instance, sent Queen Mary a miniature of the Three Magi. The zeal for collecting works of art, begun in Italy, had spread to England" In which point some of our nobility and divers private gentlemen have very well acquitted themselves; as may appear by their galleries, carefully furnished with the excellent monuments of sundry famous ancient masters, both Italian and German." Even the native painters were appreciated; Richard Haydocke desired "the skilful pen of George Vasari" to draw parallels between English painters and Italian, and compare Nicholas Hilliard "with the mild spirit of the late world's wonder, Raphael Urbini."

It is significant of the interest which was beginning to be taken in all works of art, especially by such collectors as the Earl of Arundel, that a special invoice of bronzes by John Bologna was not long afterward sent on commission from Florence to London.* Inigo Jones himself purchased works of art, when in

1 Now at St. Petersburg.

2 Guardaroba Medicea, Florence, filza 34.

3 R. Haydocke, preface to Lomazzo, 1598.

4 Guardaroba Medicea, 293, p. 81. Among other subjects were represented a Hercules with a club in his hand (perhaps the one now in the print room of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), a Hercules killing the Centaur, a woman with a ball, a figure of Fortune, a Centaur carrying away Dejanira, etc. In this consignment there were also several wax figures.

Italy, for the Earl of Arundel and Lords Pembroke and Danvers. The history of the collector's zeal in England rightly belongs, however, to a later period than the age of Elizabeth.

III

The Reformation has, until recently, been regarded almost as an exclusively Teutonic counterpart of the Italian Renaissance. As a result of this, the ethical and religious influence of Italy has been underrated, even when not entirely neglected. Toward the end of the sixteenth century it had become almost a fashion for moralists to see in Italy only a centre of vice and corruption. Partly, perhaps, on account of the survival of this idea, partly through ignorance, the sterner and more austere aspects of Italian life were generally overlooked. The religious enthusiasm of a Savonarola lay covered by the iniquity of the Borgias. The great crimes of the age, and not its virtues, alone struck the popular eye. It would, however, be a very one-sided estimate of the Italian Renaissance to regard it as an age when only the arts and learning flourished in an atmosphere of depravity. To deny the excesses committed, or the vice of the age, would be no less untrue than to blind one's eyes to its piety, which existed then, all the brighter, perhaps, for the evil which surrounded it. Too little attention has been given to the Italian religious influence in England, first noticeable in the effect of the humanist criticism of the Scriptures on Grocyn and Colet. The Italian reformers who found