Bernard Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, including at the University of Melbourne. He has been described as the founder of Australian Art History, and his presence and influence in Australian cultural life immense. This is one of many of his lectures given in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Melbourne between 1956 and 1966 and at a time when it was the only art history department in an Australian university. They are lectures in the history of art that range from Palaeolithic to the Romantic Movement. These lectures are presented as originally written and are archival in nature with no attempt to bring them up-to-date. They belong to their time. ; This is one of 10 lectures in Smith's Renaissance art series. These include presentations on Baroque and Rococo; Dutch Art; Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century; The Fifteenth Century; Giotto and Trecento Painting; High Renaissance; High Renaissance and Mannerism; Mannerist Architecture and Baroque; Rembrandt and Tiepolo. Despite new stirrings of originality in Italy, Italian thirteenth century architecture, sculpture and painting is still dominated by the Gothic style. France remained at this time the art centre of the world; and the current of influence still swept from north o south, from France and Germany into Italy. During the first half of the fourteenth century, however, that is, during the Trecento, Italy saw daring innovations and developments in the art of painting and in painting became the most advanced country of the west; so that for painting, at least, the current of influence, after many centuries, changed and began to flow from Italy to the north.