ed the instant appreciation of their creation;
forgetting, or not understanding, in both cases, the wonderful
efficacy of tradition.

As regards us moderns, for whom the tradition of, say, Tuscan art has
so long been broken off or crossed by various other and very different
ones--as regards ourselves, I am inclined to think that we can best
recover it by sympathetic attention to those forms of art, humbler or
more public, which must originally have prepared and kept up the
interest of the people for whom the Tuscan craftsmen worked.

Pictures and statues, even in a traditional period, embody a large
amount of merely personal peculiarities of individual artists,
testifying to many activities--imitation, self-assertion,
rivalry--which have no real aesthetic value. And, during the fifteenth
century and in Tuscany especially, the flow of traditional aesthetic
feeling is grievously altered and adulterated by the merest scientific
tendencies: a painter or sculptor being often, in the first instance,
a student of anatomy, archaeology or perspective. One may, therefore,
be familiar for twenty years with Tuscan Renaissance painting or
sculpture, and yet remain very faintly conscious of the special
aesthetic character, the _virtues_ (in the language of herbals) of
Tuscan art. Hence I should almost say, better let alone the pictures
and statues until you are sufficiently acquainted with the particular
quality lurking therein to recognise, extricate and assimilate it,
despite irrelevant ingredients. Learn the _quality_ of Tuscan art from
those categories of it which are most impersonal, most traditional,
and most organic and also freer from scientific interference, say
architecture and decoration; and from architecture rather in its
humble, unobtrusive work than in the great exceptional creations which
imply, like the cupola of Florence, the assertion of a personality,
the surmounting of a difficulty, and even the braving of other folks'
opinion. I believe that if one learned, not merely to know, but to
feel, to enjoy very completely and very specifically, the quality of
distinctness and reserve, slightness of means and greatness of
proportions, of the domestic architecture and decoration of the
fifteenth century, if one made one's own the mood underlying the
special straight lines and curves, the symmetry and hiatus of the
colonnades, for instance, inside Florentine houses; of the little bits
of carving on escutcheon and firepla