instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended in space.  A figure like this may have a mathematical but certainly has no psychological significance.  Uccello, it is true, has studied every detail of this phenomenon and noted down his observations, but because his notes happen to be in form and colour, they do not therefore constitute a work of art.  Wherein does his achievement differ in quality from a coloured map of a country?  We can easily conceive of a relief map of Cadore or Giverny on so large a scale, and so elaborately coloured, that it will be an exact reproduction of the physical aspects of those regions, but never for a moment should we place it beside a landscape by Titian or Monet, and think of it as a work of art.  Yet its relation to the Titian or Monet painting is exactly that of Uccello’s achievement to Giotto’s.  What the scientist who paints—­the naturalist, that is to say,—­attempts to do is not to give us what art alone can give us, the life-enhancing qualities of objects, but a reproduction of them as they are.  If he succeeded, he would give us the exact visual impression of the objects themselves, but art, as we have already agreed, must give us not the mere reproductions of things but a quickened sense of capacity for realising them.  Artistically, then, the naturalists, Uccello and his numerous successors, accomplished nothing.  Yet their efforts to reproduce objects as they are, their studies in anatomy and perspective, made it inevitable that when another great genius did arise, he should be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, and not a Giotto.

[Page heading:  ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO]

Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong tendencies in Florentine painting—­of art for dexterity’s sake, and art for scientific purposes.  Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much artistic genius to succumb to either.  He was endowed with great sense for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less from one more peculiar to himself—­the tendency to communicate at any cost a feeling of power.  To make us feel power as Masaccio and Michelangelo do at their best is indeed an achievement, but it requires the highest genius and the profoundest sense for the significant.  The moment this sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying high spirits.  Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such single figures as his Cumaean Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty, elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,—­as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo di Tolentino—­or to mere strength, as in his “Last Supper,” or, worse still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa Maria Nuova “Crucifixion.”  Nevertheless, his few remaining works lead us to suspect in him the greatest artist, and the most influential personality among the painters of the first generation after Masaccio.