the limbs, which are always modelled with a freedom that suggests the power of movement even in stationary attitudes, the voluminous folds and broad masses of powerfully coloured raiment invest his forms with a nobility unknown before in painting.  His power of representing the nude is not less remarkable.  But what above all else renders his style attractive is the sense of aerial space.  For the first time in art the forms of living persons are shown moving in a transparent medium of light, graduated according to degrees of distance, and harmonised by tones that indicate an atmospheric unity.  In comparing Masaccio with Giotto we must admit that, with so much gained, something has been sacrificed.  Giotto succeeded in presenting the idea, the feeling, the pith of the event, and pierced at once to the very ground-root of imagination.  Masaccio thinks over-much, perhaps, of external form, and is intent on air-effects and colouring.  He realises the phenomenal truth with a largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself.  But we ask whether he was capable of bringing close to our hearts the secret and the soul of spiritual things.  Has not art beneath his touch become more scenic, losing thereby somewhat of dramatic poignancy?

Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 for Rome, and was not heard of by his family again.  Thus perished, at the early age of twenty-seven, a painter whose work reveals not only the originality of real creative genius, but a maturity that moves our wonder.  What might he not have done if he had lived?  Between his style in the Brancacci chapel and that of Raphael in the Vatican there seems to be but a narrow gap, which might perchance have been passed over by this man, if death had spared him.

Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair instance of the painters of his age.  Gifted with exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties of his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof as yet no scientific certainty had been secured.  His contemporaries applied humbler talents to severe study, and wrought out by patient industry those principles which Masaccio had divined.  Their work is therefore at the same time more archaic and more pedantic, judged by modern standards.  It is difficult to imagine a style of painting less attractive than that of Paolo Uccello.[164] Yet his fresco of the “Deluge” in the cloisters of S. Maria Novella, and his battlepieces—­one of which may be seen in the National Gallery—­taught nearly all that painters needed of perspective.  The lesson was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill-coloured and deficient in the quality of animation.  At this period the painters, like the sculptors, were trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a craftsman of that guild before he gave his whole mind to the study of linear perspective and the drawing of animals.  The precision required in this trade forced artists to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude naturalism which has been charged against