The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance | Page 9

he gave to Florentine painting the direction it pursued to
the end. In many ways he reminds us of the young Bellini. Who knows?
Had he but lived as long, he might have laid the foundation for a
painting not less delightful and far more profound than that of Venice.
As it was, his frescoes at once became, and for as long as there were
real artists among them remained, the training-school of Florentine
painters.
V.
Masaccio's death left Florentine painting in the hands of three men
older, and two somewhat younger than himself, all men of great talent,
if not of genius, each of whom--the former to the extent habits already
formed would permit, the latter overwhelmingly, felt his influence. The
older, who, but for Masaccio, would themselves have been the sole
determining personalities in their art, were Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello,
and Andrea del Castagno; the younger, Domenico Veneziano and Fra
Filippo. As these were the men who for a whole generation after
Masaccio's death remained at the head of their craft, forming the taste
of the public, and communicating their habits and aspirations to their
pupils, we at this point can scarcely do better than try to get some
notion of each of them and of the general art tendencies they
represented.
[Page heading: PAOLO UCCELLO]
Fra Angelico we know already as the painter who devoted his life to
picturing the departing mediæval vision of a heaven upon earth.
Nothing could have been farther from the purpose of Uccello and
Castagno. Different as these two were from each other, they have this
much in common, that in their works which remain to us, dating, it is

true, from their years of maturity, there is no touch of mediæval
sentiment, no note of transition. As artists they belonged entirely to the
new era, and they stand at the beginning of the Renaissance as types of
two tendencies which were to prevail in Florence throughout the whole
of the fifteenth century, partly supplementing and partly undoing the
teaching of Masaccio.
Uccello had a sense of tactile values and a feeling for colour, but in so
far as he used these gifts at all, it was to illustrate scientific problems.
His real passion was perspective, and painting was to him a mere
occasion for solving some problem in this science, and displaying his
mastery over its difficulties. Accordingly he composed pictures in
which he contrived to get as many lines as possible leading the eye
inward. Prostrate horses, dead or dying cavaliers, broken lances,
ploughed fields, Noah's arks, are used by him with scarcely an attempt
at disguise, to serve his scheme of mathematically converging lines. In
his zeal he forgot local colour--he loved to paint his horses green or
pink--forgot action, forgot composition, and, it need scarcely be added,
significance. Thus in his battle-pieces, instead of adequate action of any
sort, we get the feeling of witnessing a show of stuffed figures whose
mechanical movements have been suddenly arrested by some clog in
their wires; in his fresco of the "Deluge," he has so covered his space
with demonstrations of his cleverness in perspective and foreshortening
that, far from bringing home to us the terrors of a cataclysm, he at the
utmost suggests the bursting of a mill-dam; and in the neighbouring
fresco of the "Sacrifice of Noah," just as some capitally constructed
figures are about to enable us to realise the scene, all possibility of
artistic pleasure is destroyed by our seeing an object in the air which,
after some difficulty, we decipher as a human being plunging
downward from the clouds. Instead of making this figure, which, by the
way, is meant to represent God the Father, plunge toward us, Uccello
deliberately preferred to make it dash inward, away from us, thereby
displaying his great skill in both perspective and foreshortening, but at
the same time writing himself down as the founder of two families of
painters which have flourished ever since, the artists for dexterity's
sake--mental or manual, it scarcely matters--and the naturalists. As
these two clans increased rapidly in Florence, and, for both good and

evil, greatly affected the whole subsequent course of Florentine
painting, we must, before going farther, briefly define to ourselves
dexterity and naturalism, and their relation to art.
[Page heading: ART FOR DEXTERITY'S SAKE]
The essential in painting, especially in figure-painting, is, we agreed,
the rendering of the tactile values of the forms represented, because by
this means, and this alone, can the art make us realise forms better than
we do in life. The great painter, then, is, above all, an artist with a great
sense of tactile values and great skill in rendering them. Now this sense,
though it will increase as the man is revealed to himself, is something
which