the aisle, the girl going to market, the crowd round the stalls in the market, the monks, white, grey, and black—­things as they were, as like as two peas to the reality; flesh and blood now painted, not skin and bone; not the expression on the face alone, but the whole body in speaking movement; nothing conventional, nothing imitative of old models, but actual life as it lay before the painter’s eyes.  Into this fresh aera of art Lippo Lippi led the way with the joy of youth.  But he was too soon.  The Prior, all the representatives of the conservative elements in the convent, were sorely troubled.  “Why, this will never do:  faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true; life as it is; nature as she is; quite impossible.”  And Browning, in Lippo’s defence of himself, paints the conflict of the past with the coming art in a passage too long to quote, too admirable to shorten.

The new art conquered the old.  The whole life of Florence was soon painted as it was:  the face of the town, the streets, the churches, the towers, the winding river, the mountains round about it; the country, the fields and hills and hamlets, the peasants at work, ploughing, sowing, and gathering fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the trees and in the sky; nobles and rich burghers hunting, hawking; the magistrates, the citizens, the street-boys, the fine ladies, the tradesmen’s wives, the heads of the guilds; the women visiting their friends; the interior of the houses.  We may see this art of human life in the apse of Santa Maria Novella, painted by the hand of Ghirlandajo:  in the Riccardi Palace, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli; in more than half the pictures of the painters who succeeded Fra Lippo Lippi.  Only, so much of the old clings that all this actual Florentine life is painted into the ancient religious subjects—­the life of the Baptist and the Virgin, the embassage of the Wise Men, the life of Christ, the legends of the saints, the lives of the virgins and martyrs, Jerusalem and its life painted as if it were Florence and its life—­all the spiritual religion gone out of it, it is true, but yet, another kind of religion budding in it—­the religion, not of the monastery, but of daily common life.

                the world
    —­The beauty and the wonder and the power,
    The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades. 
    Changes, surprises—­and God made it all!

Who paints these things as if they were alive, and loves them while he paints, paints the garment of God; and men not only understand their own life better because they see, through the painting, what they did not see before; but also the movement of God’s spirit in the beauty of the world and in the life of men.  Art interprets to man all that is, and God in it.

                Oh, oh,
    It makes me mad to think what men shall do
    And we in our graves!  This world’s no blot for us,
    No blank; it means intensely, and means good: 
    To find its meaning is my meat and drink.