but sculpture had
for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting
for antique influence; and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello
was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto.

With Masaccio began the study of nature for its own sake, the desire of
reproducing external objects, without any regard to their significance
as symbols, or as parts of a story; the passionate wish to arrive at
absolute realization. The merely suggestive outline art of the
Giottesques had come to an end; the suggestion became a matter of
indifference, the realization became a paramount interest; the story was
forgotten in the telling, the religious thought was lost in the search
for the artistic form. The Giottesques had used debased conventionalism
to represent action with wonderful narrative and logical power; the
artists of the early Renaissance became unskilful narrators and foolish
allegorists almost in proportion as they became skilful draughtsmen and
colourists; the saints had become to Masaccio merely so many lay figures
on to which to cast drapery; for Fra Filippo the Madonna was a mere
peasant model; for Filippino Lippi and for Ghirlandajo, a miracle meant
merely an opportunity of congregating a number of admirable portrait
figures in the dress of the day; the Baptism for Verrocchio had
significance only as a study of muscular legs and arms; and the
sacrifice of Noah had no importance for Uccello save as a grand
opportunity for foreshortenings. In the hands of the Giottesques,
interested in the subject and indifferent to the representation,
painting had remained stationary for eighty years; for eighty years did
it develope in the hands of the men of the fifteenth century,
indifferent to the subject and passionately interested in the
representation. The unity, the appearance of comparative perfection of
the art had disappeared with the limits within which the Giottesques had
been satisfied to move; instead of the intelligible and solemn
conventionalism of the Giottesques, we see only disorder,
half-understood ideas and abortive attempts, confusion which reminds us
of those enigmatic sheets on which Leonardo or Michael Angelo scrawled
out their ideas--drawings within drawings, plans of buildings scratched
over Madonna heads, single flowers upside down next to flayed arms,
calculations, monsters, sonnets; a very chaos of thoughts and of shapes,
in which the plan of the artist is inex