Professor J. C. Van Dyke of Rutgers College delivered the first of his course of lectures, on the early Italian Renaissance, last evening in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory. The subject of the lecture was the Florentine School.

The Renaissance in Italy, Mr. Van Dyke said, dates from 1501 to 1692, covering nearly two centuries. Before this period Italy was plunged in the darkness of the Middle Ages. Even during this period of darkness many paintings were made, and the wonder is not that the work which this age produced is poor, but that it could produce any work at all. The great men of Italy were Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. They represented three great elements of art, the religious, the realistic and the classical, and these are the fundamental elements of all the Renaissance painting.

With the opening of the fifteenth century the new movement for the revival of ancient art and literature began in earnest, and this movement found its most perfect expression in art. This was chiefly owing to the Italian nature, which had received all its classical and biblical instruction from colored object teaching. Painting was the color thought of the people. Every person was an art critic, for all the churches were art schools. Through this whole period of the Renaissance the church was always the greatest patron of art, and three-fourths of all the paintings of the time was done for, and at the command of, the church.

The revival of the study of ancient Greek art and sculpture showed the painters of the early fifteenth century the errors in their technique, and sent new painters to nature for models. They studied now with a greater love of truth and precision.

The chief seat of learning, both in art and literature, in the fifteenth century was Florence. In Botticelli one of the first of the Florentian school, we find all three of the elements of the painting of this period combined. He was a pupil of Savonarola, and was a charming painter if not a great one. The leader of the new awakening in art in Florence was Mazatio, a man whom Raphael and Michael Angelo did not disdain to follow. Many men of other schools also were drawn to Florence who in time adopted the Florentine School. At this period there were really in Italy, but two great schools, the Florentine and the Venetian. All the others were small branches from these two.

The lecture was illustrated with many lantern slides of the famous pictures of the Florentine School.