lling and
bas-relief; for the painters, labouring in the workshops of the goldsmiths
and the stone-carvers, learned how to study the articulation of the human
body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of graduated light and dark
at rendering the effect of roundness in their drawing. The laws of
perspective and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello and
Brunelleschi. New methods of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and
the Pollajuoli. Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes,
the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday
experience. It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes,
striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that
many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious
art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and
character. At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and
architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas
of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic
scenery of wood and rock and seashore. Many were naturalists, delighting,
like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living
creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and
curious. Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects.
Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo
Uccello. Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for
the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the
time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling.
We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters: that stage
of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful,
idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's
vision, opens for the artist. Instead of seeking to set forth vast
subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent
architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like
the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special
quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some
technical problem of peculiar difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown the
childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery,
had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal
expression. In thi