to enable us to realise the scene, all possibility of
artistic pleasure is destroyed by our seeing an object in the air which,
after some difficulty, we decipher as a human being plunging downward
from the clouds. Instead of making this figure, which, by the way, is
meant to represent God the Father, plunge toward us, Uccello
deliberately preferred to make it dash inward, away from us, thereby
displaying his great skill in both perspective and foreshortening, but
at the same time writing himself down as the founder of two families of
painters which have flourished ever since, the artists for dexterity's
sake--mental or manual, it scarcely matters--and the naturalists. As
these two clans increased rapidly in Florence, and, for both good and
evil, greatly affected the whole subsequent course of Florentine
painting, we must, before going farther, briefly define to ourselves
dexterity and naturalism, and their relation to art.

[Page heading: ART FOR DEXTERITY'S SAKE]

The essential in painting, especially in figure-painting, is, we agreed,
the rendering of the tactile values of the forms represented, because by
this means, and this alone, can the art make us realise forms better
than we do in life. The great painter, then, is, above all, an artist
with a great sense of tactile values and great skill in rendering them.
Now this sense, though it will increase as the man is revealed to
himself, is something which the great painter possesses at the start, so
that he is scarcely, if at all, aware of possessing it. His conscious
effort is given to the means of rendering. It is of means of rendering,
therefore, that he talks to others; and, because his triumphs here are
hard-earned and conscious, it is on his skill in rendering that he
prides himself. The greater the painter, the less likely he is to be
aware of aught else in his art than problems of rendering--but all the
while he is communicating what the force of his genius makes him feel
without his striving for it, almost without his being aware of it, the
material and spiritual significance of forms. However--his intimates
hear him talk of nothing but skill; he seems to think of nothing but
skill; and naturally they, and the entire public, conclude that his
skill is his genius, and that skill _is_ art. This, alas, has at all
times been the too prevalent notion of what art is, divergence of
opinion existing not on the principle, but on the kind of dexterity to
be prized, ea