m, therefore, as
something rather apart, a sort of school in himself, or at most with
Domenico, his master, and his follower, della Gatta. But more careful
looking will show that his greatest qualities, so balanced and so
clear in him, are shared--though often masked by the ungainlinesses of
hurried artistic growth--by Pollaiolo, Baldovinetti, Pesellino, let
alone Uccello, Castagno, and Masaccio; are, in a word, Tuscan,
Florentine. But more than by such studies, the kinship and nationality
of Pier della Francesca is proved by reference to the other branches
of Tuscan art: his peculiarities correspond to the treatment of line
and projection by those early stonemasons of the Baptistery and the
Pistoia churches, to the treatment of enclosed spaces and manipulated
light in those fifteenth-century sacristies and chapels, to the
treatment of mass and boundary in the finest reliefs of Donatello and
Donatello's great decorative follower Desiderio. To persons, however,
who are ready to think with me that we may be trained to art in fields
and on hillsides, the essential Tuscan character of Pier della
Francesca is brought home quite as strongly by the particular
satisfaction with which we recognise his pictures in some unlikely
place, say a Northern gallery. For it is a satisfaction, _sui generis_
and with its own emotional flavour, like that which we experience on
return to Tuscany, on seeing from the train the white houses on the
slopes, the cypresses at the cross roads, the subtler, lower lines of
hills, the blue of distant peaks, on realising once more our depth of
tranquil love for this austere and gentle country.

XI.

Save in the lushness of early summer, Tuscany is, on the whole, pale;
a country where the loveliness of colour is that of its luminousness,
and where light is paramount. From this arises, perhaps, the austerity
of its true summer--summer when fields are bare, grass burnt to
delicate cinnamon and russet, and the hills, with their sere herbs and
bushes, seem modelled out of pale rosy or amethyst light; an austerity
for the eye corresponding to a sense of healthfulness given by steady,
intense heat, purged of all damp, pure like the scents of dry leaves,
of warm, cypress resin and of burnt thyme and myrrh of the stony
ravines and stubbly fields. On such August days the plain and the more
distant mountains will sometimes be obliterated, leaving only the
inexpressible suavity of the hills on the same side as t