distribution of masses, the arrangement of
space; above all, of the lines of a picture. But it is independent of
the fact of the object represented being or not what in real life we
should judge beautiful; and it is, in large works, unfortunately even
more separate from such arrangement as will render a complicated
composition intelligible to the mind or even to the eye. The problems
of anatomy, relief, muscular action, and perspective which engrossed
and in many cases harassed the Florentines of the Renaissance, turned
their attention away from the habit of beautiful general composition
which had become traditional even in the dullest and most effete of
their Giottesque predecessors, and left them neither time nor
inclination for wonderful new invention in figure distribution like
that of their contemporary Umbrians. Save in easel pictures,
therefore, there is often a distressing confusion, a sort of dreary
random packing, in the works of men like Uccello, Lippi, Pollaiolo,
Filippino, Ghirlandaio, and even Botticelli. And even in the more
simply and often charmingly arranged easel pictures, the men and women
represented, even the angels and children, are often very far from
being what in real life would be deemed beautiful, or remarkable by
any special beauty of attitude and gesture. They are, in truth,
studies, anatomical or otherwise, although studies in nearly every
case dignified by the habit of a very serious and tender devoutness:
rarely soulless or insolent studio drudgery or swagger such as came
when art ceased to be truly popular and religious. Studies, however,
with little or no selection of the reality studied, and less thought
even for the place or manner in which they were to be used.

But these studies are executed, however scientific their intention,
under the guidance of a sense and a habit of beauty, subtle and
imperious in proportion, almost, as it is self-unconscious. These
figures, sometimes ungainly, occasionally ill-made, and these
features, frequently homely or marred by some conspicuous ugliness,
are made up of lines as enchantingly beautiful, as seriously
satisfying, as those which surrounded the Tuscans in their landscape.
And it is in the extracting of such beauty of lines out of the
bewildering confusion of huge frescoes, it is in the seeing as
arrangements of such lines the sometimes unattractive men and women
and children painted (and for that matter, often also sculptured) by
the great