n image of the orc, as it appeared to Ariosto's fancy--a creature
borrowed from romance and made to play its part in a Greek myth. The same
criticism applies to Piero's picture of the murdered Procris watched by a
Satyr of the woodland.[193] In creating his Satyr the painter has not had
recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being
half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in
Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. The strange animals
and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove
the subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Florentine realism and
quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be
profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of
the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment was more free than when
superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art,
and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for
themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the
display of erudition.

It remains to speak of the painter who closes and at the same time gathers
up the whole tradition of this period. Domenico Ghirlandajo deserves this
place of honour not because he had the keenest intuitions, the deepest
thought, the strongest passion, the subtlest fancy, the loftiest
imagination--for in all these points he was excelled by some one or other
of his contemporaries or predecessors--but because his intellect was the
most comprehensive and his mastery of art the most complete. His life
lasted from 1449 to 1498, and he did not distinguish himself as a painter
till he was past thirty.[194] Therefore he does not properly fall within
the limit of 1470, assigned roughly to this age of transition in
painting. But in style and spirit he belonged to it, resuming in his own
work the qualities we find scattered through the minor artists of the
fifteenth century, and giving them the unity of fusion in a large and
lucid manner. Like the painters hitherto discussed, he was working toward
the full Renaissance; yet he reached it neither in ideality nor in
freedom. His art is the art of the understanding only; and to this the
masters of the golden age added radiance, sublimity, grace,
passion--qualities of the imagination beyond the scope of men like
Ghirlandajo.

It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this
powerful b