Fra Filippo. As these were the men who for a whole generation after
Masaccio's death remained at the head of their craft, forming the taste
of the public, and communicating their habits and aspirations to their
pupils, we at this point can scarcely do better than try to get some
notion of each of them and of the general art tendencies they
represented.

[Page heading: PAOLO UCCELLO]

Fra Angelico we know already as the painter who devoted his life to
picturing the departing mediaeval vision of a heaven upon earth. Nothing
could have been farther from the purpose of Uccello and Castagno.
Different as these two were from each other, they have this much in
common, that in their works which remain to us, dating, it is true, from
their years of maturity, there is no touch of mediaeval sentiment, no
note of transition. As artists they belonged entirely to the new era,
and they stand at the beginning of the Renaissance as types of two
tendencies which were to prevail in Florence throughout the whole of the
fifteenth century, partly supplementing and partly undoing the teaching
of Masaccio.

Uccello had a sense of tactile values and a feeling for colour, but in
so far as he used these gifts at all, it was to illustrate scientific
problems. His real passion was perspective, and painting was to him a
mere occasion for solving some problem in this science, and displaying
his mastery over its difficulties. Accordingly he composed pictures in
which he contrived to get as many lines as possible leading the eye
inward. Prostrate horses, dead or dying cavaliers, broken lances,
ploughed fields, Noah's arks, are used by him with scarcely an attempt
at disguise, to serve his scheme of mathematically converging lines. In
his zeal he forgot local colour--he loved to paint his horses green or
pink--forgot action, forgot composition, and, it need scarcely be added,
significance. Thus in his battle-pieces, instead of adequate action of
any sort, we get the feeling of witnessing a show of stuffed figures
whose mechanical movements have been suddenly arrested by some clog in
their wires; in his fresco of the "Deluge," he has so covered his space
with demonstrations of his cleverness in perspective and foreshortening
that, far from bringing home to us the terrors of a cataclysm, he at the
utmost suggests the bursting of a mill-dam; and in the neighbouring
fresco of the "Sacrifice of Noah," just as some capitally constructed
figures are about