their pictures.  Carefully to observe, minutely to imitate some actual person—­the Sandro of your workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace—­became the pride of painters.  No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval mysticism, and unable for the moment to invest ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile made the great discovery that the body of a man is a miracle of beauty, each limb a divine wonder, each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or flowers.  Much that is repulsive in the pictures of the Pollajuoli and Andrea del Castagno, the leaders in this branch of realism, is due to admiration for the newly studied mechanism of the human form.  They seem to have cared but little to select their types or to accentuate expression, so long as they were able to portray the man before them with fidelity.[165] The comeliness of average humanity was enough for them; the difficulties of reproducing what they saw, exhausted their force.  Thus the master-works on which they staked their reputation show them emulous of fame as craftsmen, while only here and there, in minor paintings for the most part, the poet that was in them sees the light.  Brunelleschi told Donatello the truth when he said that his Christ was a crucified contadino.  Intent on mastering the art of modelling, and determined above all things to be accurate, the sculptor had forgotten that something more was wanted in a crucifix than the careful study of a robust peasant-boy.

A story of a somewhat later date still further illustrates the dependence of the work of art upon the model in Renaissance Florence.  Jacopo Sansovino made the statue of a youthful “Bacchus” in close imitation of a lad called Pippo Fabro.  Posing for hours together naked in a cold studio, Pippo fell into ill health, and finally went mad.  In his madness he frequently assumed the attitude of the “Bacchus” to which his life had been sacrificed, and which is now his portrait.  The legend of the painter who kept his model on a cross in order that he might the more minutely represent the agonies of death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the realistic method carried to its logical extremity.

Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San Sepolcro, and a pupil of Domenico Veneziano, must be placed among the painters of this period who advanced their art by scientific study.  He carried the principles of correct drawing and solid modelling as far as it is possible for the genius of man to do, and composed a treatise on perspective in the vulgar tongue.  But these are not his only titles to fame.  By dignity of portraiture, by loftiness of style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of imagination, he raised himself above the level of the mass of his contemporaries.  Those who have once seen his fresco of the “Resurrection” in the hall of the Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepolcro, will never forget the deep impression of solitude and aloofness from all earthly things produced by it.