We have, on the contrary, before us an image of the orc, as it appeared to Ariosto’s fancy—­a creature borrowed from romance and made to play its part in a Greek myth.  The same criticism applies to Piero’s picture of the murdered Procris watched by a Satyr of the woodland.[193] In creating his Satyr the painter has not had recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence.  The strange animals and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove the subject from the sphere of classic treatment.  Florentine realism and quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of the earlier Renaissance.  Fancy at that moment was more free than when superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art, and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the display of erudition.

It remains to speak of the painter who closes and at the same time gathers up the whole tradition of this period.  Domenico Ghirlandajo deserves this place of honour not because he had the keenest intuitions, the deepest thought, the strongest passion, the subtlest fancy, the loftiest imagination—­for in all these points he was excelled by some one or other of his contemporaries or predecessors—­but because his intellect was the most comprehensive and his mastery of art the most complete.  His life lasted from 1449 to 1498, and he did not distinguish himself as a painter till he was past thirty.[194] Therefore he does not properly fall within the limit of 1470, assigned roughly to this age of transition in painting.  But in style and spirit he belonged to it, resuming in his own work the qualities we find scattered through the minor artists of the fifteenth century, and giving them the unity of fusion in a large and lucid manner.  Like the painters hitherto discussed, he was working toward the full Renaissance; yet he reached it neither in ideality nor in freedom.  His art is the art of the understanding only; and to this the masters of the golden age added radiance, sublimity, grace, passion—­qualities of the imagination beyond the scope of men like Ghirlandajo.

It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto of the fifteenth century in Florence, the tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio.  He was a consummate master of the science collected by his predecessors.  No one surpassed him in the use of fresco.  His orderly composition, in the distribution of figures and the use of architectural accessories, is worthy of all praise; his portraiture is dignified and powerful;[195] his choice of form and treatment of drapery, noble.  Yet we cannot help noting