But much had to happen first, particularly the mastery of the laws of perspective, and it was not (as we have seen) until Ghiberti had got to work on his first doors, and Brunelleschi was studying architecture and Uccello sitting up all night at his desk, that painting as we know it—­painting of men and women “in the round”—­could be done, and it was left for a youth who was not born until Giotto had been dead sixty-four years to do this first as a master—­one Tommaso di Ser Giovanni Guido da Castel San Giovanni, known as Masaccio, or Big Tom.  The three great names then in the evolution of Italian painting, a subject to which I return in chapter XXV, on the Carmine, are Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio.

We pass on at the Accademia from Cimabue’s pupil Giotto, to Giotto’s followers, Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi, and Daddi’s follower Spinello Aretino, and the long dependent and interdependent line of painters.  For the most part they painted altar-pieces, these early craftsmen, the Church being the principal patron of art.  These works are many of them faded and so elementary as to have but an antiquarian interest; but think of the excitement in those days when the picture was at last ready, and, gay in its gold, was erected in the chapel!  Among the purely ecclesiastical works No. 137, an Annunciation by Giovanni del Biondo (second half of the fourteenth century), is light and cheerful, and No. 142, the Crowning of the Virgin, by Rosello di Jacopo Franchi (1376-1456), has some delightful details and is everywhere joyous, with a charming green pattern in it.  The wedding scenes in No. 147 give us Florentine life on the mundane side with some valuable thoroughness, and the Pietro Lorenzetti above—­scenes in the life of S. Umilita—­is very quaint and cheery and was painted as early as 1316.  The little Virgin adoring, No. 160, in the corner, by the fertile Ignoto, is charmingly pretty.

And now for the three screens, notable among the screens of the galleries of Europe as holding three of the happiest pictures ever painted.  The first is the Adoration of the Magi, by Gentile da Fabriano, an artist of whom one sees too little.  His full name was Gentile di Niccolo di Giovanni Massi, and he was born at Fabriano between 1360 and 1370, some twenty years before Fra Angelico.  According to Vasari he was Fra Angelico’s master, but that is now considered doubtful, and yet the three little scenes from the life of Christ in the predella of this picture are nearer Fra Angelico in spirit and charm than any, not by a follower, that I have seen.  Gentile did much work at Venice before he came to Florence, in 1422, and this picture, which is considered his masterpiece, was painted in 1423 for S. Trinita.  He died four years later.  Gentile was charming rather than great, and to this work might be applied Ruskin’s sarcastic description of poor Ghirlandaio’s frescoes, that they are mere goldsmith’s work; and yet it is much more, for it has gaiety and sweetness