filacf 



]g John of Padua. 



to 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 

 "par 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 11 a 

 case of Raffaelle Sanzio (his family name), more commonly spoken I 

 of as Raffaelle V'Urbino (the place of his birth) : or, again, Pietro 1 

 Vdnmcci, 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. |ati 



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. 



