art more rejuvenating than Angelico’s “Coronation” (in the Uffizi)—­the happiness on all the faces, the flower-like grace of line and colour, the childlike simplicity yet unqualifiable beauty of the composition?  And all this in tactile values which compel us to grant the reality of the scene, although in a world where real people are standing, sitting, and kneeling we know not, and care not, on what.  It is true, the significance of the event represented is scarcely touched upon, but then how well Angelico communicates the feeling with which it inspired him!  Yet simple though he was as a person, simple and one-sided as was his message, as a product he was singularly complex.  He was the typical painter of the transition from Mediaeval to Renaissance.  The sources of his feeling are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern; and almost modern also are his means of expression.  We are too apt to forget this transitional character of his, and, ranking him with the moderns, we count against him every awkwardness of action, and every lack of articulation in his figures.  Yet both in action and in articulation he made great progress upon his precursors—­so great that, but for Masaccio, who completely surpassed him, we should value him as an innovator.  Moreover, he was not only the first Italian to paint a landscape that can be identified (a view of Lake Trasimene from Cortona), but the first to communicate a sense of the pleasantness of nature.  How readily we feel the freshness and spring-time gaiety of his gardens in the frescoes of the “Annunciation” and the “Noli me tangere” at San Marco!

IV.

[Page heading:  MASACCIO]

Giotto born again, starting where death had cut short his advance, instantly making his own all that had been gained during his absence, and profiting by the new conditions, the new demands—­imagine such an avatar, and you will understand Masaccio.

Giotto we know already, but what were the new conditions, the new demands?  The mediaeval skies had been torn asunder and a new heaven and a new earth had appeared, which the abler spirits were already inhabiting and enjoying.  Here new interests and new values prevailed.  The thing of sovereign price was the power to subdue and to create; of sovereign interest all that helped man to know the world he was living in and his power over it.  To the artist the change offered a field of the freest activity.  It is always his business to reveal to an age its ideals.  But what room was there for sculpture and painting,—­arts whose first purpose it is to make us realise the material significance of things—­in a period like the Middle Ages, when the human body was denied all intrinsic significance?  In such an age the figure artist can thrive, as Giotto did, only in spite of it, and as an isolated phenomenon.  In the Renaissance, on the contrary, the figure artist had a demand made on him such as had not been made since the great Greek days, to reveal to a generation believing in man’s power to subdue and to possess the world, the physical types best fitted for the task.  And as this demand was imperative and constant, not one, but a hundred Italian artists arose, able each in his own way to meet it,—­in their combined achievement, rivalling the art of the Greeks.