18 John of Padua. 
4o answer it, have missed the scent, is that, being called in English 
John of Padua, it has been always taken for granted that he must 
have been either a native, or a citizen of that city. In that case it 
would follow that his own family name had been dropped, and that 
“nar excellence,’ through some easy superiority to all other “ Johns” 
in the same branch of art, the public voice had glorified the city by 
connecting his Christian name with it. Such, for example, was the 
case of Raffaelle Sanzio (his family name), more commonly spoken 
of as Raffaelle D’ Urbino (the place of his birth) : or, again, Pietro 
Vannucci, more famous as Pietro Perugino (from the town of Perugia) . 
But this can hardly have been the case with our “ John of Padua.” 
For, in the first place, in such a document as royal letters patent, a for- 
eigner, who had any family name at all, would never have been loosely 
described as William of Rome, George of Naples, or John of Padua. 
Many of the great Italian artists, it is true, are best known by 
their Christian names only, as Raffaelle, Guido, Michael Angelo, 
&c., and where the Christian name was a common one the mouth 
of the public sometimes appended the name of the place. All 
Italy knows in a moment who is meant by John of Bologna, but 
of John of Padua nobody in Italy appears to know anything. In 
our country also, we have very old historians who are known to us 
only as “John of Salisbury,” “ Richard of Devizes,” and others. 
The clergy, more particularly, were named from their homes. In 
the episcopal registers at Salisbury, the greater part of the earliest 
entries (the end of the thirteenth century) are in that form: for no 
other reason than that family names were at that time unsettled 
and uncertain, The country clergy, more particularly being generally 
of humble origin, could only be distinguished by the name of the 
village they belonged to, as “ William of Edington,” “ William of 
Wykeham, &c. In this way names of places ultimately became 
family names, But family names had long been settled in England 
before Henry VIII., and in Italy for centuries before that. 
Again, a man of European reputation might be expected to have 
left, in his own country, at all events, some master-pieces of work, 
or some undisputable records of his work, which is certainly not 
the case in this instance. 
