how soon would his restless, raging emotions have become hushed
into a great silence!

* * * * *

A few evenings afterward, as they were all sitting together in the
library, and Howard with them, Mr. Sumner, knowing that the young people
had been reading and talking of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, said that
perhaps there would be no better time for talking of these artists than
the present.

"With Masaccio," he continued, "we have begun a new period of Italian
painting,--the period of the Early Renaissance. All the former great
artists,--Cimabue, Giotto, and Fra Angelico, whom we have particularly
studied,--and the lesser ones, about whom you have read,--Orcagna,
Taddeo Gaddi, and Uccello, the bird-lover (who gave himself so
untiringly to the study of linear perspective),--belong to the Gothic
period, literally the rude period; in which, although a steady advance
was made, yet the works are all more or less very imperfect
art-productions. All these are wholly in the service of the Church, and
are painted in fresco on plaster or in _tempera_ on wood. In the Early
Renaissance, however, a new impulse was seen. Artists were much better
equipped for their work, nature-study progressed wonderfully, anatomy
was studied, perspective was mastered, the sphere of art widened to take
in history, portraits, and mythology; and in the latter part of this
period, as we shall see, oil-painting was introduced."

"Can you give us any dates of these periods to remember, uncle?" asked
Malcom.

"Roughly speaking, the Gothic period covers the years from about 1250 to
1400; the Early Renaissance, from about 1400 to 1500. Masaccio, as we
have seen, was the first great painter of the Early Renaissance, and he
lived from 1401 to 1428. But these dates are not arbitrary. Fra Angelico
lived until 1455, and yet his pictures belong wholly to the Gothic
period; so also do those of other Gothic painters whose lives overlap
the Early Renaissance in point of time. It is the spirit of the art
that definitely determines its place, although the general dates help
one to remember.

"We will not talk long of Ghirlandajo,--Domenico Ghirlandajo (for there
is another, Ridolfo by name, who is not nearly so important to the
art-world). His composition is similar to that of Masaccio. A few people
are intimately engaged, and the others are bystanders, or onlookers. One
characteristic is that many of these last are portraits of Flo