s way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first
half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters
of the Golden Age. It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to
achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty.
But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable
intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of
Bacon's _media axiomata_ in science. Remembering this, we ought not to
complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch was divided, or that
its achievements were imperfect. The whole intellectual conditions of the
country were those of growth, experiment, preparation, and acquisition,
rather than of full accomplishment. What happened in the field of
painting, was happening also in the field of scholarship; and we have good
reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the arts, these tentative
endeavours have a more enduring charm than the dull tomes of contemporary
students. Nor, again, is it rational to regret that painting, having
started with the sincere desire of expressing the hopes and fears that
agitate the soul of man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now
be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy. In the twofold
process of discovering the world and man, this dry ground had inevitably
to be explored, and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice
of much that was impassioned and imaginative in the earlier and less
scientific age of art.[161] The spirit of Cosimo de' Medici, almost
cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its
egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period;[162] indeed, the fifteenth
century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal
aims. Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far
more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of
Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of
Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of
pagan vices. Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel
of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting.
The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and
less large than Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out for them
and leading forward to Erasmus. The painters of the fifteenth, though they
lacked the unity of aim and fre