charm than the dull tomes of contemporary students.  Nor, again, is it rational to regret that painting, having started with the sincere desire of expressing the hopes and fears that agitate the soul of man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy.  In the twofold process of discovering the world and man, this dry ground had inevitably to be explored, and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice of much that was impassioned and imaginative in the earlier and less scientific age of art.[161] The spirit of Cosimo de’ Medici, almost cynical in its positivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period;[162] indeed, the fifteenth century presents at large a spectacle of prosaic worldliness and unideal aims.  Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of pagan vices.  Petrarch in the fourteenth century had preached the evangel of humanism; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life to painting.  The students of the fifteenth, though their spirit was so much baser and less large than Petrarch’s, were following in the path marked out for them and leading forward to Erasmus.  The painters of the fifteenth, though they lacked the unity of aim and freshness of their master, were learning what was needful for the crowning and fulfilment of his labours on a loftier stage.

Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance-painting, towering above them all by head and shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, stands Masaccio.[163] The Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine at Florence, painted in fresco almost entirely by his hand, was the school where all succeeding artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned to borrow the composition and the figures of a portion of his Cartoons.  The “Legend of S. Catherine,” painted by Masaccio in 8.  Clemente at Rome, though an earlier work, is scarcely less remarkable as evidence that a new age had begun for art.  In his frescoes the qualities essential to the style of the Renaissance—­what Vasari calls the modern manner—­appear precociously full-formed.  Besides life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the grand and heightened manner of emancipated art.  Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power of telling a story with simplicity; but he understands the value of perspective for realising the circumstances of the scene depicted.  His august groups of the Apostles are surrounded by landscape tranquillising to the sense and pleasant to the eye.  Mountain-lines and distant horizons lend space and largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his men and women move freely in a world prepared for them.  In Masaccio’s management of drapery we discern the influence of plastic art; without concealing