The accounts of the cathedral at Orvieto give us names of artists who devoted themselves to its decoration towards the end of the fourteenth century--others were working in Perugia, painting effigies of traitors, hanging head downwards on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico, but we have no reason to rank them higher than those who have left traces of their work in the little votive chapels that lie in the hills and out-of-the-way corners of Umbria. Some of these, going back to 1393, are not without a character of their own, guiltless indeed, of technique, but naïve, vivid, and full of energy; yet they show little of that gradual growth which marks the Florentine school, nor do we find in them any trace of the fine, precise touch, which the early Sienese painters drew from the school of Byzantium. According to Mariotti, the art of miniature painting and illumination was carried on with great enthusiasm in Perugia, in the fourteenth century. Dante speaks of Oderisio of Gubbio:
"--Non se' tu Oderisi, L'Onor d'Agobbio, e l'onor di quell' arte, Ch' alluminare è chiamata in Parisi?"
Then, when the fifteenth century was unfolding, two streams of art sweep across the province, distinct, yet mighty, mingling like the waters of the Rhine and Rhone. The many scattered towns of Umbria led to a far greater variety of type, individuality was more frequently maintained, influences spread more fitfully and partially than in those parts of Italy where all studied together, and practice and theory flew like wildfire from one to the other, emulations flourished, traditions were quickly formed and earnestly followed.
Gentile da Fabriano stands forth among the dearth of talent in Umbria at the dawn of the century, as the one master who was great enough to add realism to glowing colour and vivacity of fancy, and who, taking the old missal-painting character as a groundwork, could transplant all the pride of pageantry of the Middle Ages on to his panels, and give us in the gold brocades and velvet robes, in fairy princes and beautiful ladies, tropic birds and strange beasts, such a scene of joyous gallantry that, as in the "Adoration of the Magi," we can hear the tinkle of bells and the clang of gilded trappings, as the long procession winds down the gay hillside.