phenomenal truth with
a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself. But we ask whether he was
capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of
spiritual things. Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing
thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy?

Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard
of by his family again. Thus perished, at the early age of twenty-seven, a
painter whose work reveals not only the originality of real creative
genius, but a maturity that moves our wonder. What might he not have done
if he had lived? Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of
Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might
perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him.

Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of
his age. Gifted with exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties of
his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientific
certainty had been secured. His contemporaries applied humbler talents to
severe study, and wrought out by patient industry those principles which
Masaccio had divined. Their work is therefore at the same time more
archaic and more pedantic, judged by modern standards. It is difficult to
imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo
Uccello.[164] Yet his fresco of the "Deluge" in the cloisters of S. Maria
Novella, and his battlepieces--one of which may be seen in the National
Gallery--taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective. The lesson
was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in
the quality of animation. At this period the painters, like the sculptors,
were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild
before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the
drawing of animals. The precision required in this trade forced artists
to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude
naturalism which has been charged against their pictures. Carefully to
observe, minutely to imitate some actual person--the Sandro of your
workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace--became the pride of painters.
No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval mysticism, and unable for
the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made
the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each
limb a divine wonder