mountains round about it; the country,
the fields and hills and hamlets, the peasants at work, ploughing,
sowing, and gathering fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the
trees and in the sky; nobles and rich burghers hunting, hawking; the
magistrates, the citizens, the street-boys, the fine ladies, the
tradesmen's wives, the heads of the guilds; the women visiting their
friends; the interior of the houses. We may see this art of human life
in the apse of Santa Maria Novella, painted by the hand of Ghirlandajo:
in the Riccardi Palace, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli; in more than half
the pictures of the painters who succeeded Fra Lippo Lippi. Only, so
much of the old clings that all this actual Florentine life is painted
into the ancient religious subjects--the life of the Baptist and the
Virgin, the embassage of the Wise Men, the life of Christ, the legends
of the saints, the lives of the virgins and martyrs, Jerusalem and its
life painted as if it were Florence and its life--all the spiritual
religion gone out of it, it is true, but yet, another kind of religion
budding in it--the religion, not of the monastery, but of daily common
life.

the world
--The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades.
Changes, surprises--and God made it all!

Who paints these things as if they were alive, and loves them while he
paints, paints the garment of God; and men not only understand their own
life better because they see, through the painting, what they did not
see before; but also the movement of God's spirit in the beauty of the
world and in the life of men. Art interprets to man all that is, and God
in it.

Oh, oh,
It makes me mad to think what men shall do
And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us,
No blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

He could not do it; the time was not ripe enough. But he began it. And
the spirit of its coming breaks out in all he did.

We take a leap of more than half a century when we pass from _Fra Lippo
Lippi_ to _Andrea del Sarto_. That advance in art to which Lippo Lippi
looked forward with a kind of rage at his own powerlessness had been
made. In its making, the art of the Renaissance had painted men and
women, both body and soul, in every kind of life, both of war and peace;
and better than they had ever been painted before.