ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS.

There is here a large hall, containing a brief chronicle of the progress of
painting from Cimabue to--Carlo Dolce! There may be a still deeper descent;
but that is bathos sufficient for any lover of his species.

It is desirable to look at these painters of the thirteenth, fourteenth,
and fifteenth centuries with some reference to the political condition of
Florence and of Italy at that time. In truth, Florence during the period of
its life _was_ Italy,--the _vivida vis_, creative, contemplative, ornative,
impulsive to the clay of Europe. The art of painting seems to spring
full-grown into existence, with the appearance of Cimabue in the latter
part of the thirteenth century. Even so the Italian language suddenly
crystallizes itself into a brilliant and perpetual type, at the same epoch
as the wondrous poem of Dante flashes forth from the brooding chaos,--the
_fiat lux_ of a new intellectual world.

The Emperor Frederic II., last of the imperial Hohenstaufens, died in 1250.
Chivalrous, adventurous, despotic, as became the head of the conquering
German races at their epoch of triumph,--imaginative, poetical, debauched,
atheistical, as might be expected of a prince born in Italy, he seemed to
justify the somewhat incongruous eagerness with which the Florentine mind
sought political salvation in the bosom of the Church. Yet here seems the
fatal flaw in the liberal system of Italy at that period. The Ghibelline
party was at least consistent. To be an imperialist, a Hohenstaufenite,
was at least definite; as much so as to be an absolutist, a Habsburgite,
a Napoleonite to-day. But to be a Guelph,--to be in favor of municipal
development, local self-government, intellectual progress, and to fight for
all these things under the banner of the Church, in an age which witnessed