faint, it is true, but still soft and
charming in colour, while in the Uffizi there is in the corridor an
altarpiece with St. Matthew in the midst that is certainly partially his
own. Nothing at all remains to us of the work of Starnina, the master of
Masolino, and thus we lose the link which should connect the art of
Giotto and the Giottesques with the art of Masolino and Angelico.[117]
It was about the same time as Starnina was painting in the chapel of S.
Girolamo at the Carmine that Lorenzo Monaco was working in the manner of
Agnolo Gaddi. His work is beautiful by reason of its delicacy and
gentleness, but it is so completely in the old manner that Vasari gives
his altarpiece of the Annunciation now here in the Accademia (No. 143)
to Giotto, praising that master for the tremulous sweetness of Madonna
as she shrinks before the Announcing Angel just about to alight from
heaven. It is a very different scene you come upon in his altarpiece in
S. Trinita, where Gabriel, his beautiful wings furled, has already
fallen on his knees, and our Lord Himself, still among the Cherubim,
speeds the Dove to Mary, who has looked up from her book suddenly in an
ecstasy.

[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS

_By Domenico Ghirlandajo, Accademia_

_Anderson_]

No work that we possess of the fourteenth century, save Giotto's,
prepares us for the frescoes of Masolino: they must be sought in the
Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine. But of the work of Masaccio his pupil,
though his best work remains in the same place, there may be found here
in the Accademia an early altarpiece of Madonna and Child with St.
Anne (Sala III, No. 70). Born in 1401, dying when he was but
twenty-seven years of age, he recreated for himself that reality in
painting which it had been the chief business of Giotto to discover.
Influenced by Donatello, his work is almost as immediate as that of
sculpture. Impressive and full of an energy that seems to be life
itself, his figures have almost the sense of reality. "I feel," says Mr.
Berenson, "that I could touch every figure, that it would yield a
definite resistance ... that I could walk round it." There follow Paolo
Uccello, whose work will be found in the Uffizi, and Andrea del
Castagno, who painted the equestrian portrait of Niccolo da Tolentino in
the Duomo, and the frescoes in S. Apollonia.

Thus we come really into the midst of the fifteenth century, to the work
of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and B