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At the outset of this work I thought it possible that I might have to lay down my pen at the end of the fifth volume, but it is with con- siderable pleasure I learn that my readers have been in great enough number and sufficiently satisfied with the work for my editor and myself to continue the enterprise and undertake a study of the fifteenth century, similar to that which has already appeared on the fourteenth. The spontaneous manifestations of sympathy that I have received from many different countries give me the impression that there exists a group of readers who will not be disappointed to hear of my intention to continue this history of Italian painting, at least until the end of the fifteenth century which is a period not rn any way less glorious than those with which I have already dealt. I should like to give one word of warning to the authorities of galleries and to private collectors who of late have started buying pictures of the thirteenth century. Notwithstanding the fact that the interest in this form of art is of recent date, the amount of facticious paintings of this period is already very considerable. Many of them are half-length figures of the Madonna painted on late Byzantine panels of the same subject; Greek Madonnas of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries are in this way transformed into Italian pictures of the thirteenth.
