s, that spitting of the
soldiers, those slaps; and to hear, if possible, the chink of the pieces
of silver that sold our Lord. How different, these two pictorial dodges
of the purely mechanical Catholicism of the fifteenth century from
the tender or harrowing gospel illustrations, where every detail is
conceived as happening in the artist's own town and to his own kinsfolk,
of the Lutheran engravers of the school of Duerer!

Thus things go on throughout the fifteenth century, and, indeed,
deep into the sixteenth, where traditional arrangement and individual
conception overlap, according as a new artistic power does or does not
call forth a new dramatic idea. I have already alluded to the fact that
the Presentation of the Virgin remains the same, so far as arrangement
is concerned, in the pictures of Titian and Tintoret as in the frescoes
of Giotto and Gaddi. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam seems still inherited
from an obscure painter in the "Green Cloister," who inherited it from
the Pisan sculptors. On the other hand, the Resurrection and Last Judgment
of Signorelli at Orvieto, painted some years earlier, constitutes in many
of its dramatic details a perfectly original work. Be this as it may, and
however frequent the recurrence of old themes, with the sixteenth century
commences the era of new individual dramatic invention. Michelangelo's
Dividing of the Light from the Darkness, where the Creator broods still
in chaos, and commands the world to exist; and Raphael's Liberation of
St. Peter, with its triple illumination from the moon, the soldier's
torches and the glory of the liberating angel, are witnesses that
henceforward each man may invent for himself, because each man is in
possession of those artistic means which the Giottesques had indicated
and the artists of the fifteenth century had laboriously acquired. And
now, the Giottesque programme being fulfilled, art may go abroad and
seek for new methods and effects, for new dramatic conceptions.

III

The other day, walking along the river near Careggi (with its memories
of Lorenzo dei Medici and his Platonists), close to the little cupola
and loggia built by Ghirlandaio, I came upon a strip of new grass,
thickly whitened with daisies, beneath the poplars beginning to yellow
with pale sprouting leaves. And immediately there arose in my mind, by
the side of this real grass and real budding of trees, the remembrance
of certain early Renaissance pictures: the rus