way from his drawing to his meals or his rest, and only replied to his
wife's remonstrances, "Ah, this perspective is so delightful!" With what
ardor Mantegna and Luca Signorelli seized upon a new trait or action!
Leonardo da Vinci, "the first name of the fifteenth century," a man to
whom any career was open, and who seemed almost equally fit for any,
never walked the streets without a sketch-book in his hand, and was all
his life long immersed in the study of Appearance, with a persistent
scrutiny that is revealed by his endless caricatures and studies, but
perhaps by nothing more clearly than by his incidental discovery of the
principle of the stereoscope, which he describes in his treatise on
Painting. This was no learned curiosity, nor the whim of seeing the
universe under drill, but only a clearer instinct of what the purpose of
Art is, namely, to see the reality of the actual world in and as the
appearance, instead of groping for some ulterior reality hidden behind
it. Leonardo has been called the precursor of Bacon. Certainly the
conviction that underlies this passion for the outside of things is the
same in both,--the firm belief that the truth is not to be sought in
some remote seventh heaven, but in a truer view of the universe about
us.

Donatello told Paolo Uccello that he was leaving the substance for the
show. But the painter doubtless felt that the show was more real than
any such "substance." For it is the finite taken as what it truly is,
nothing in itself, but only the show of the infinite. If it seem shadowy
and abstract, it is to be considered with what it is compared. What an
abstraction is depends on what is taken away and what left behind. For
instance, the Slavery question in our politics is sometimes termed an
abstraction. Yes, surely, if the dollar _is_ almighty, is the final
reality,--if peace and comfort are alone worth living for,--then the
Slavery question and several other things are abstractions. So in the
world of matter, if the chemical results are the reality of it, the
appearance may well be considered as an abstraction. But this is not the
view of Art; Art has never magnified the materiality of the finite; on
the contrary, its history is only the record of successive attempts to
dispose of matter, the failure always lying in the hasty effort to
abolish it altogether in favor of an immaterial principle outside of it,
something behind the phenomena, like Kant's _noumenon_,--too fine to