ce of Tuscan hillside farms; let
alone of the plainest sepulchral slabs in Santa Croce, one would be
in better case for really appreciating, say, Botticelli or Pier della
Francesca than after ever so much comparison of their work with that
of other painters. For, through familiarity with that humbler, more
purely impersonal and traditional art, a certain mode of being in
oneself, which is the special aesthetic mood of the Tuscan's would have
become organised and be aroused at the slightest indication of the
qualities producing it, so that their presence would never escape one.
This, I believe, is the secret of all aesthetic training: the growing
accustomed, as it were automatically, to respond to the work of art's
bidding; to march or dance to Apollo's harping with the irresistible
instinct with which the rats and the children followed the pied
piper's pipe. This is the aesthetic training which quite unconsciously
and incidentally came to the men of the past through daily habit of
artistic forms which existed and varied in the commonest objects just
as in the greatest masterpieces. And through it alone was the highest
art brought into fruitful contact with even the most everyday persons:
the tradition which already existed making inevitable the tradition
which followed.

But to return to us moderns, who have to reconstitute deliberately a
vanished aesthetic tradition, it seems to me that such familiarity with
Tuscan art once initiated, we can learn more, producing and canalising
its special moods, from a frosty afternoon like this one on the
hillside, with its particular taste of air, its particular line of
shelving rock and twisting road and accentuating reed or cypress in
the delicate light, than from hours in a room where Signorelli and
Lippi, Angelico and Pollaiolo, are all telling one different things
in different languages.

III.

These thoughts, and the ones I shall try to make clear as I go on,
began to take shape one early winter morning some ten years ago, while
I was staying among the vineyards in the little range of hills which
separate the valley of the Ombrone from the lower valley of the Arno.
Stony hills, stony paths between leafless lilac hedges, stony outlines
of crest, fringed with thin rosy bare trees; here and there a few
bright green pines; for the rest, olives and sulphur-yellow sere vines
among them; the wide valley all a pale blue wash, and Monte Morello
opposite wrapped in mists. It was v