Verrocchio and settled in Lombardy, is
barely one of them; and Michel Angelo never at all--Michel Angelo with
his moods all of Rome or the great mountains, full of trouble, always,
and tragedy. These great personalities, and the other eclectics,
Raphael foremost, bring qualities to art which it had lacked before,
and are required to make its appeal legitimately universal. I should
shrink from judging their importance, compared with the older and more
local and traditional men. Still further from me is it to prefer this
Tuscan art to that, as local and traditional in its way, of Umbria or
Venetia, which stands to this as the most poignant lyric or the
richest romance stands, let us say, to the characteristic quality,
sober yet subtle, of Dante's greatest passages. There is, thank
heaven, wholesome art various enough to appeal to many various healthy
temperaments; and perhaps for each single temperament more than one
kind of art is needful. My object in the foregoing pages has not been
to put forward reasons for preferring the art of the Tuscans any more
than the climate and landscape of Tuscany; but merely to bring home
what the especial charm and power of Tuscan art and Tuscan nature seem
to me to be. More can be gained by knowing any art lovingly in itself
than by knowing twenty arts from each other through dry comparison.

I have tried to suggest rather than to explain in what way the art of
a country may answer to its natural character, by inducing recurrent
moods of a given kind. I would not have it thought, however, that such
moods need be dominant, or even exist at all, in all the inhabitants
of that country. Art, wide as its appeal may be, is no more a product
of the great mass of persons than is abstract thought or special
invention, however largely these may be put to profit by the
generality. The bulk of the inhabitants help to make the art by
furnishing the occasional exceptionally endowed creature called an
artist, by determining his education and surroundings, in so far as he
is a mere citizen; and finally by bringing to bear on him the
stored-up habit of acquiescence in whatever art has been accepted by
that public from the artists of the immediate past. In fact, the
majority affects the artist mainly as itself has been affected by his
predecessors. If, therefore, the scenery and climate call forth moods
in a whole people definite enough to influence the art, this will be
due, I think, to some especially g