ing those steep places among the
pines or the myrtles, under the scorch of the wholesome summer sun, or
in the face of the pure, snowy wind. The wind, so rarely at rest, has
helped to make the Tuscan spirit, calling for a certain resoluteness
to resist it, but, in return, taking all sense of weight away, making
the body merge, so to speak, into eye and mind, and turning one, for a
little while, into part of the merely visible and audible. The
frequent possibility of such views as I have tried to define, of such
moments of fulness of life, has given, methinks, the quality of
definiteness and harmony, of active, participated in, greatness, to
the art of Tuscany.

VIII.

It is a pity that, as regards painting, this Tuscan feeling (for
Giottesque painting had the cosmopolitan, as distinguished from local,
quality of the Middle Ages and of the Franciscan movement) should have
been at its strongest just in the century when mere scientific
interest was uppermost. Nay, one is tempted to think that matters were
made worse by that very love of the strenuous, the definite, the
lucid, which is part of the Tuscan spirit. So that we have to pick
out, in men like Donatello, Uccello, Pollaiolo and Verrocchio, nay,
even in Lippi and Botticelli, the fragments which correspond to what
we get quite unmixed and perfect in the Romanesque churches of Pisa,
Florence, and Pistoia, in the sacristies and chapels of Brunelleschi,
Alberti, and Sangallo, and in a hundred exquisite cloisters and
loggias of unnoticed town houses and remote farms. But perhaps there
is added a zest (by no means out of keeping with the Tuscan feeling)
to our enjoyment by the slight effort which is thus imposed upon us:
Tuscan art does not give its exquisiteness for nothing.

Be this as it may, the beauty of Florentine Renaissance painting must
be sought, very often, not in the object which the picture represents,
but in the mode in which that object is represented. Our habits of
thought are so slovenly in these matters, and our vocabulary so poor
and confused, that I find it difficult to make my exact meaning clear
without some insistence. I am not referring to the mere moral
qualities of care, decision, or respectfulness, though the recognition
thereof adds undoubtedly to the noble pleasure of a work of art; still
less to the technical or scientific lucidity which the picture
exhibits. The beauty of fifteenth-century painting is a visible
quality, a quality of the