room was there for sculpture and painting,--arts whose first
purpose it is to make us realise the material significance of things--in
a period like the Middle Ages, when the human body was denied all
intrinsic significance? In such an age the figure artist can thrive, as
Giotto did, only in spite of it, and as an isolated phenomenon. In the
Renaissance, on the contrary, the figure artist had a demand made on him
such as had not been made since the great Greek days, to reveal to a
generation believing in man's power to subdue and to possess the world,
the physical types best fitted for the task. And as this demand was
imperative and constant, not one, but a hundred Italian artists arose,
able each in his own way to meet it,--in their combined achievement,
rivalling the art of the Greeks.

In sculpture Donatello had already given body to the new ideals when
Masaccio began his brief career, and in the education, the awakening, of
the younger artist the example of the elder must have been of
incalculable force. But a type gains vastly in significance by being
presented in some action along with other individuals of the same type;
and here Donatello was apt, rather than to draw his meed of profit, to
incur loss by descending to the obvious--witness his _bas-reliefs_ at
Siena, Florence, and Padua. Masaccio was untouched by this taint.
Types, in themselves of the manliest, he presents with a sense for the
materially significant which makes us realise to the utmost their power
and dignity; and the spiritual significance thus gained he uses to give
the highest import to the event he is portraying; this import, in turn,
gives a higher value to the types, and thus, whether we devote our
attention to his types or to his action, Masaccio keeps us on a high
plane of reality and significance. In later painting we shall easily
find greater science, greater craft, and greater perfection of detail,
but greater reality, greater significance, I venture to say, never.
Dust-bitten and ruined though his Brancacci Chapel frescoes now are, I
never see them without the strongest stimulation of my tactile
consciousness. I feel that I could touch every figure, that it would
yield a definite resistance to my touch, that I should have to expend
thus much effort to displace it, that I could walk around it. In short,
I scarcely could realise it more, and in real life I should scarcely
realise it so well, the attention of each of us being too apt to
co