ving, artists gone on making _filiations of schools_, if art, if
artists, if schools of artists had not answered an imperious, undying
wish for the special pleasures which painting can give?

Therefore it seems to me that, desirable for all reasons as may be the
study of art, the knowledge of _filiations and influences_, it is still
more desirable that each of us should find out some painter whom he
can care for individually; and that all of us should find out certain
painters who can, almost infallibly, give immense pleasure to all of
us; painters who, had they been produced out of nothingness and been
followed by nobody, would yet stand in the most important relation in
which an artist can be: the relation of being beloved by the whole
world, or even by a few solitary individuals.

For this reason let not the mere reader, who comes to art not for work,
but for refreshment, let not the mere reader (I call him reader, to
note his passive, leisurely character) be vexed with too much study of
Florentine and Paduan _precursors_, but go straight to the masters, whom
those useful and dreary persons rendered possible by their grinding.
Our ancestors, or rather those cardinals and superb lords with whom we
have neither spiritual nor temporal relationship, who made the great
collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, placing statues
under delicate colonnades and green ilex hedges, and hanging pictures in
oak-panelled corridors and tapestried guard-rooms, were occasionally
mistaken in thinking that a Roman emperor much restored, or a chalky,
sprawling Guido Reni, could afford lasting aesthetic pleasure; but,
bating such errors, were they not nearer good sense than we moderns, who
arrange pictures and statues as we might minerals or herbs in a museum,
and who, for instance, insist that poor tired people, longing for a
little beauty, should carefully examine the works of Castagno, of
Rosselli, and of that artist, so interesting as a specimen of the
minimum of talent, Neri di Bicci? They were unscientific, those lords
and cardinals, and desperately pleasure-seeking; but surely, surely
they were more sensible than we.

Connected with this fact, and to be borne in mind by those not called
upon to elucidate art scientifically, is the further fact, which I have
analogically pointed out, when I said that every individual has in the
Past affinities, possibilities of spiritual satisfaction differing
somewhat from those of