THE RENAISSANCE 271 was discovered: they had painted up to that time with colors mixed either with water, white of egg, or with wax. Toward the middle of the fifteenth century it was found that colors could be mixed with oil in such a way that they could be rapidly dried: the inventor is probably a Flemish1 painter, John of Bruges. Since that time there have been two methods of painting, water-color upon a layer of fresh plaster, already known in the Middle Ages; this was called in Italian painting ol fresco (whence the name fresco) ; and oil painting, which was at first done upon wood (the word tableau, picture, signifies plank), later upon canvas. THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE The Protectors of the Renaissance,—Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century, was a soil particularly favor- able to the growth of the arts. The princes and the nobles did not, as in the other countries of Europe, pass their time in hunting and in fighting. The nobles and the rich bourgeoisie had a passionate taste for beautiful things; they came together in order to read verse, they desired to have handsome churches, beauti- ful palaces, and fine furniture; and not only did they pay the artists, but they esteemed them greatly. While in the other countries the nobles treated the artists as if they were workmen or domestics, in Italy the great- est personages counted it a glory and an honor to be -surrounded by men of talent. The most celebrated * In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were in the rich cities of Flanders many painters occupied in making altar pictures and in painting statues of wood for the churches,