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 the great painter possesses at the start, so

that he is scarcely, if at all, aware of possessing it. His conscious

effort is given to the means of rendering. It is of means of rendering,

therefore, that he talks to others; and, because his triumphs here are

hard-earned and conscious, it is on his skill in rendering that he

prides himself. The greater the painter, the less likely he is to be

aware of aught else in his art than problems of rendering--but all the

while he is communicating what the force of his genius makes him feel

without his striving for it, almost without his being aware of it, the

material and spiritual significance of forms. However--his intimates

hear him talk of nothing but skill; he seems to think of nothing but

skill; and naturally they, and the entire public, conclude that his

skill is his genius, and that skill _is_ art. This, alas, has at all

times been the too prevalent notion of what art is, divergence of

opinion existing not on the principle, but on the kind of dexterity to

be prized, each generation, each critic, having an individual standard,

based always on the several peculiar problems and difficulties that

interest them. At Florence these inverted notions about art were

especially prevalent because it was a school of art with a score of men

of genius and a thousand mediocrities all egging each other on to

exhibitions of dexterity, and in their hot rivalry it was all the great

geniuses could do to be faithful to their sense of significance. Even

Masaccio was driven to exhibit his mere skill, the much admired and by

itself wonderfully realised figure of a naked man trembling with cold

being not only without real significance, but positively distracting,

in the representation of a baptism. A weaker man like Paolo Uccello

almost entirely sacrificed what sense of artistic significance he may

have started with, in his eagerness to display his skill and knowledge.

As for the rabble, their work has now the interest of prize exhibitions

at local art schools, and their number merely helped to accelerate the

momentum with which Florentine art rushed to its end. But out of even

mere dexterity a certain benefit to art may come. Men without feeling

for the significant may yet perfect a thousand matters which make

rendering easier and quicker for the man who comes with something to

render, and when Botticelli and Leonardo and Michelangelo appeared, they

found their artistic patrimony increased in spite of the fact that since

Masaccio there had been no man at all approaching their genius. This

increase, however, was due not at all so much to the sons of dexterity,

as to the intellectually much nobler, but artistically even inferior

race of whom also Uccello was the ancestor--the Naturalists.

[Page heading: NATURALISM IN ART]

What is a Naturalist? I venture upon the following definition:--A man

with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not

to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus

communicating them to us more rapidly and intensely than we should

perceive them ourselves, and thereby giving us a sense of heightened

vitality; his purpose is research, and his communication consists of

nothing but facts. From this perhaps too abstract statement let us take

refuge in an example already touched upon--the figure of the Almighty in

Uccello's "Sacrifice of Noah." Instead of presenting this figure as

coming toward us in an attitude and with an expression that will appeal

to our sense of solemnity, as a man whose chief interest was artistic

would have done--as Giotto, in fact, did in his "Baptism"--Uccello seems

to have been possessed with nothing but the scientific intention to find

out how a man swooping down head-foremost would have looked if at a

given instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended

in space. A figure like this may have a mathematical but certainly has

no psychological significance. Uccello, it is true, has studied every

detail of this phenomenon and noted down his observations, but because

his notes happen to be in form and colour, they do not therefore

constitute a work of art. Wherein does his achievement differ in quality

from a coloured map of a country? We can easily conceive of a relief map

of Cadore or Giverny on so large a scale, and so elaborately coloured,

that it will be an exact reproduction of the physical aspects of those

regions, but never for a moment should we place it beside a landscape by

Titian or Monet, and think of it as a work of art. Yet its relation to

the Titian or Monet painting is exactly that of Uccello's achievement to

Giotto's. What the scientist who paints--the naturalist, that is to

say,--attempts to do is not to give us what art alone can give us, the

life-enhancing qualities of objects, but a reproduction of them as they

are. If he succeeded, he would give us the exact visual impression of

the objects themselves, but art, as we have already agreed, must give us

not the mere reproductions of things but a quickened sense of capacity

for realising them. Artistically, then, the naturalists, Uccello and

his numerous successors, accomplished nothing. Yet their efforts to

reproduce objects as they are, their studies in anatomy and perspective,

made it inevitable that when another great genius did arise, he should

be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, and not a Giotto.

[Page heading: ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO]

Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong

tendencies in Florentine painting--of art for dexterity's sake, and art

for scientific purposes. Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to

resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much

artistic genius to succumb to either. He was endowed with great sense

for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him

completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less

from one more peculiar to himself--the tendency to communicate at any

cost a feeling of power. To make us feel power as Masaccio and

Michelangelo do at their best is indeed an achievement, but it requires

the highest genius and the profoundest sense for the significant. The

moment this sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in

conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere

strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying

high spirits. Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such

single figures as his Cumæan Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which

have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty,

elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,--as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo

di Tolentino--or to mere strength, as in his "Last Supper," or, worse

still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa Maria Nuova "Crucifixion."

Nevertheless, his few remaining works lead us to suspect in him the

greatest artist, and the most influential personality among the painters

of the first generation after Masaccio.