itable. Wherefore the world and the
arts of design became the richer by a new, useful, and most beautiful
art, and he gained immortal and everlasting glory and praise. Luca was
an excellent and graceful draughtsman, as it may be seen from some
drawings in our book with the lights picked out with white lead, in one
of which is his portrait, made by him with much diligence by looking at
himself in a mirror.

[Illustration: THE VISITATION

(_After_ Giovanni della Robbia. _Pistoia: S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas_)

_Alinari_]

PAOLO UCCELLO

LIFE OF PAOLO UCCELLO

PAINTER OF FLORENCE

Paolo Uccello would have been the most gracious and fanciful genius that
was ever devoted to the art of painting, from Giotto's day to our own,
if he had laboured as much at figures and animals as he laboured and
lost time over the details of perspective; for although these are
ingenious and beautiful, yet if a man pursues them beyond measure he
does nothing but waste his time, exhausts his powers, fills his mind
with difficulties, and often transforms its fertility and readiness into
sterility and constraint, and renders his manner, by attending more to
these details than to figures, dry and angular, which all comes from a
wish to examine things too minutely; not to mention that very often he
becomes solitary, eccentric, melancholy, and poor, as did Paolo Uccello.
This man, endowed by nature with a penetrating and subtle mind, knew no
other delight than to investigate certain difficult, nay, impossible
problems of perspective, which, although they were fanciful and
beautiful, yet hindered him so greatly in the painting of figures, that
the older he grew the worse he did them. And there is no doubt that if a
man does violence to his nature with too ardent studies, although he may
sharpen one edge of his genius, yet nothing that he does appears done
with that facility and grace which are natural to those who put each
stroke in its proper place temperately and with a calm intelligence full
of judgment, avoiding certain subtleties that rather burden a man's work
with a certain laboured, dry, constrained, and bad manner, which moves
those who see it rather to compassion than to marvel; for the spirit of
genius must be driven into action only when the intellect wishes to set
itself to work and when the fire of inspiration is kindled, since it is
then that excellent and divine qualities and marvellous conceptions are
seen to issue fo