r, the architect in paint of
the Sistine Chapel; while Andrea del Sarto appears from the first as a
foreigner, the one colourist of the school, only a Florentine in this,
that much of his work is, as it were, monumental, composing itself
really--as with the Madonna delle Arpie or the great Madonna and Saints
of the Pitti, for instance--into statuesque groups, into sculpture. So
if we admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo were rather universal than
Florentine, the most characteristic work of the school lies in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the work of Giotto, so full of
great, simple thoughts of life; in that of the Pollaiuoli, so full of
movement; but most of all perhaps in the work of Angelico, Lippo Lippi,
and Botticelli, where the significance of life has passed into beauty,
into music.

The rise of this school, so full of importance for Italy, for the world,
is very happily illustrated in the Accademia della Belle Arti; and if
the galleries of the Uffizi can show a greater number of the best works
of the Florentine painters, together with much else that is foreign to
them; if the Pitti Palace is richer in masterpieces, and possesses some
works of Raphael's Florentine period and the pictures of Fra Bartolomeo
and Andrea del Sarto, as well as a great collection of the work of the
other Italian schools, it is really in the Accademia we may study best
the rise of the Florentine school itself, finding there not only the
work of Giotto, his predecessors and disciples, but the pictures of Fra
Angelico, of Verrocchio, of Filippo Lippi, of Botticelli, the painters
of that fifteenth century which, as Pater has told us, "can hardly be
studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of
the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its
special and prominent personalities with their profound aesthetic charm,
but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of
which it is a consummate type."

The art of the Sculptors had been able to free itself from the beautiful
but sterile convention of the Byzantine masters earlier than the art of
Painting, because it had found certain fragments of antiquity scattered
up and down Southern Italy, and in such a place as the Campo Santo of
Pisa, to which it might turn for guidance and inspiration. No such
forlorn beauty remained in exile to renew the art of painting. All the
pictures of antiquity had been destroyed, and though in