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Ciiap. VIII. EARLY ART AT BOLOGNA. 205 CHAPTER VIII. PAINTERS OF BOLOGNA, FERRARA AND MODENA. The true lover of art would be seriously disappointed if, trusting to the highly coloured statements of Malvasia, he should expect to find first rate painters in the early school of Bologna. That school was of the second class during the whole of the fourteenth century, hut had a stamp of its own, a mixture of the manner prevalent in Umbria, Modena, Ferrara and Rimini. Though Giotto is supposed to have resided at Bologna, his influence on the painters of that country was not direct, and they rather studied the second and third rate Pietro and Julian of Rimini than the great Florentine himself. That Bologna, like most Italian cities, had its art in the remotest times is proved by Giambatista Verci, 1 who gives the following inscription on a lost picture, of old in S. Francesco of Bassano: “Guidus Bononiensis pingebat A. D. MCLXXVII.” Malvasia adds Ventura, who painted between 1197 and 1217, and Ursone, who lived between 1226 and 1248. We may consider in the same unknown class Simone di Bartolommeo, a miniaturist of Bologna, respecting whom Vescovo Muzi publishes a record of the year 1288, 2 an artist who may have been a cotemporary of Oderisio at Bologna. The paintings of these distant times have perished, or have been so much repainted that the critic is under the necessity cither of denying their original 4 Notizie, &c. <le’ pittori I 2 Storia de’ Cittii di Cas- dclla Citta di Bassano. 8°. |tello. Vol. I. p. 134. Venez. 1775. p. 2.
