[159] See Inferno, xxix. 121; the sonnets on the months by Cene dalla Chitarra, Poeti del Primo Secolo, vol. ii. pp. 196-207; the epithet “Molles Senae,” given by Beccadelli; and the remarks of De Comines.

[160] I have not thought it necessary to distinguish between tempera and fresco.  In tempera painting the colours were mixed with egg, gum, and other vehicles dissolved in water, and laid upon a dry ground.  In fresco painting the colours, mixed only with water, were laid upon plaster while still damp.  The latter process replaced the former for wall-paintings in the fourteenth century.

CHAPTER V

PAINTING

Mediaeval Motives exhausted—­New Impulse toward Technical Perfection—­Naturalists in Painting—­Intermediate Achievement needed for the Great Age of Art—­Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth Century—­Masaccio—­The Modern Manner—­Paolo Uccello—­Perspective—­Realistic Painters—­The Model—­Piero della Francesca—­His Study of Form—­Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro—­Melozzo da Forli—­Squarcione at Padua—­Gentile da Fabriano—­Fra Angelico—­Benozzo Gozzoli—­His Decorative Style—­Lippo Lippi—­Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto—­Filippino Lippi—­Sandro Botticelli—­His Value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy—­His Feeling for Mythology—­Piero di Cosimo—­Domenico Ghirlandajo—­In what sense he sums up the Age—­Prosaic Spirit—­Florence hitherto supreme in Painting—­Extension of Art Activity throughout Italy—­Medicean Patronage.

After the splendid outburst of painting in the first half of the fourteenth century, there came a lull.  The thoughts and sentiments of mediaeval Italy had been now set forth in art.  The sincere and simple style of Giotto was worked out.  But the new culture of the Revival had not as yet sufficiently penetrated the Italians for the painters to express it; nor had they mastered the technicalities of their craft in such a manner as to render the delineation of more complex forms of beauty possible.  The years between 1400 and 1470 may be roughly marked out as the second period of great, activity in painting.  At this time sculpture, under the hands of Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, had reached a higher point than the sister art.  The debt the sculptors owed to Giotto, they now repaid in full measure to his successors, in obedience to the law whereby sculpture, though subordinated, as in Italy, to painting, is more precocious in its evolution.  One of the most marked features of this period was the progress in the art of design, due to bronze modelling and bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing.  The laws of perspective and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello and Brunelleschi.  New methods