At Florence these inverted notions about art were especially prevalent because it was a school of art with a score of men of genius and a thousand mediocrities all egging each other on to exhibitions of dexterity
Even Masaccio was driven to exhibit his mere skill, the much admired and by itself wonderfully realised figure of a naked man trembling with cold being not only without real significance, but positively distracting
A weaker man like Paolo Uccello almost entirely sacrificed what sense of artistic significance he may have started with, in his eagerness to display his skill and knowledge as for the rabble has now interest
Men without feeling for the significant may yet perfect a thousand matters which make rendering easier and quicker for the man who comes with something to render and when Botticelli and Leonardo and Michelangelo appeared
This increase, however, was due not at all so much to the sons of dexterity, as to the intellectually much nobler, but artistically even inferior race of whom also Uccello was the ancestor the Naturalists.
A man with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus communicating them to us more rapidly and intensely
To distinguish clearly, after the lapse of nearly five centuries, between Uccello and Castagno, and to determine the precise share each had in the formation of the Florentine school, is already a task
The scantiness of his remaining works makes it more than difficult, makes it almost impossible, to come to accurate conclusions regarding the character and influence of their contemporary
It follows that the essential in the art of painting as distinguished from the art of colouring
I beg the reader to observe to stimulate our consciousness of tactile values
Picture's have power as the object represented to our tactile imagination.
Well it was the power to stimulate tactile consciousness of essential
His everlasting claim to greatness make him a highest æsthetic
Innovator is a technique in affairs of vehicle and medium but as such innovations, indispensable though they may become to painting as a craft, are in themselves questions of theoretic and applied chemistry, and not of art, they do not here concern us.
Contact USAchievements seem to have consisted in giving to the figure movement and expression and the face individuality. Existing works find no trace of sacrifice made to dexterity and naturalism, although it is clear that science and craft were prevalent in his day.
Contact USOtherwise would not have been able to render a figure like the St. Francis in his Uffizi altar-piece, where tactile values and movement expressive usually call individual perhaps for the first time combined or to attain to such triumphs as St. John and St. Francis
Contact USAs to his sense for the significant in the individual, in other words, his power as a portrait-painter, we have in the Pitti one or two heads to witness, perhaps, the first great achievements in this kind of the Renaissance.
Contact USNo such difficulties as we have encountered in the study of Uccello, Castagno, and Veneziano meet us as we turn to Fra Filippo. His works are still copious, and many of them are admirably preserved; we therefore have every facility for judging him as an artist, yet nothing is harder than to appreciate him at his due
If attractiveness, and attractiveness of the best kind, sufficed to make a great artist, then Filippo would be one of the greatest, greater perhaps than any other Florentine before Leonardo. Where shall we find faces more winsome, more appealing, than in certain of his Madonnas one in the Uffizi, for instance more momentarily evocative of noble feeling than in his Louvre altar piece
Contact USFlorentine painting is there anything more fascinating than the playfulness of his children, more poetic than one or two of his landscapes, more charming than is at times his colour
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From the brief account just given of the four dominant personalities in Florentine painting it results that the leanings of the school during this interval were not artistic alone, but tendencies on one side
The extent however that took sides and were conscious of a distinct purpose these also sided with Uccello and not with Filippo. It may be agreed therefore, the main current of Florentine painting for a generation
Masaccio was naturalistic, and that consequently the impact given to the younger painters who during this period were starting, was mainly toward naturalism. Later, in studying Botticelli, we shall see how difficult
