of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and the
Pollajuoli. Abandoning the conventional treatment
of religious themes, the artists began to take delight
in motives drawn from everyday experience. It
became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes,
striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred
subjects, so that many pictures of this period, though
worthless to the student of religious art, are interesting
for their illustration of Florentine custom and character.
At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape
and architecture, loading the background of their
frescoes with pompous vistas of palaces and city towers,
or subordinating their figures to fantastic scenery
of wood and rock and seashore. Many were naturalists,
delighting, like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation
of field flowers and living creatures, or, like Piero
di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and curious.
Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and
insects. Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance,
were painted by Paolo Uccello. Others, again,
abandoned the old ground of Christian story for the
tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming
products of the time are antique motives treated with
the freshness of romantic feeling. We look in
vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters:
that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new
cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding
to Boiardo’s episodes rather than to Dante’s
vision, opens for the artist. Instead of seeking
to set forth vast subjects with the equality of mediocrity,
like the Gaddi, or to invent architectonic compositions
embracing the whole culture of their age, like the
Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising
some special quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic
motive, or solving some technical problem of peculiar
difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown the childhood
of their art; and while they had not yet attained to
mastery, had abandoned the impossible task of making
it the medium of universal expression. In this
way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first
half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for
the great painters of the Golden Age. It remained
for Raphael and his contemporaries to achieve the
final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate
beauty. But this they could not have done without
the aid of those innumerable intermediate labourers,
whose productions occupy in art the place of Bacon’s
media axiomata in science. Remembering
this, we ought not to complain that the purpose of
painting at this epoch was divided, or that its achievements
were imperfect. The whole intellectual conditions
of the country were those of growth, experiment, preparation,
and acquisition, rather than of full accomplishment.
What happened in the field of painting, was happening
also in the field of scholarship; and we have good
reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the
arts, these tentative endeavours have a more enduring