h good training will not give genius or inspiration to
those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to
make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre
to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine
school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact
that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works
even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled
all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools
in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from
Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept
its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching
also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its
heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine
intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting
and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the
scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never
relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for
knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he
tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth
and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the
character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as
no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer
sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man
who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the
human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well
as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so
that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at
once so logical and so expressive.

The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their art more than
any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to
us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern
world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and
irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still
remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not
arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have
been conscious of it. They thought that the du