k of drawings, and
likewise that of the peasant girl, all full of fear, and in the act of
running away from those animals. There are likewise certain very
lifelike shepherds, and a landscape which was held something very
beautiful in his time. In the other canvases he made some studies of
men-at-arms of those times, on horseback, with not a few portraits from
the life.

[Illustration: PAOLO UCCELLO: THE BATTLE OF S. EGIDIO

(_London: National Gallery, 583. Panel_)]

Afterwards he was commissioned to paint some scenes in the cloister of
S. Maria Novella; and the first, which are at the entrance from the
church into the cloister, represent the Creation of the animals, with an
infinite number and variety of kinds belonging to water, earth, and air.
And since he was very fanciful and took great delight, as it has been
said, in painting animals to perfection, he showed in certain lions, who
are seeking to bite each other, the great ferocity that is in them, and
swiftness and fear in some stags and fallow-deer; not to mention that
the birds and fishes, with their feathers and scales, are most lifelike.
He made there the Creation of man and of woman, and their Fall, with a
beautiful manner and with good and careful execution. And in this work
he took delight in making the trees with colours, which the painters of
those times were not wont to do very well; and in the landscapes,
likewise, he was the first among the old painters to make a name for
himself by his work, executing them well and with greater perfection
than the painters before him had done; although afterwards there came
men who made them more perfect, for with all his labour he was never
able to give them that softness and harmony which have been given to
them in our own day by painting them in oil-colours. It was enough for
Paolo to go on, according to the rules of perspective, drawing and
foreshortening them exactly as they are, making in them all that he
saw--namely, ploughed fields, ditches, and other minutenesses of
nature--with that dry and hard manner of his; whereas, if he had picked
out the best from everything and had made use of those parts only that
come out well in painting, they would have been absolutely perfect. This
labour finished, he worked in the same cloister below two stories by the
hand of others; and lower down he painted the Flood, with Noah's Ark,
wherein he put so great pains and so great art and diligence into the
painting of the dead