ABSTRACT
THE Urbino master brought with him from his home country, the Marches, that benign universal sensibility which makes perceptible in every picture an enhancement of nature, the essential, an effective existence. When the first conscious gaze sweeps across the endless expanses of the high plateau, when the first breath inhales the rarefied mountain air and the first steps are taken up and down the stair-like streets and slopes, a buoyancy of the hips as the breeze blows round them, and in the supple knees, communicates itself to the body, giving alacrity to the eye; it is a lightness, an alacrity, to which those who were born in the mountains usually remain faithful to the end of their lives, receiving from it a sense of free superiority, physical and spiritual. Men of creative nature, but only they, will inevitably communicate something of these favoured natural surroundings to their creations; under their hands figures grow after their image.
