to our sense of solemnity, as a man whose chief interest was artistic
would have done--as Giotto, in fact, did in his "Baptism"--Uccello seems
to have been possessed with nothing but the scientific intention to find
out how a man swooping down head-foremost would have looked if at a
given instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended
in space. A figure like this may have a mathematical but certainly has
no psychological significance. Uccello, it is true, has studied every
detail of this phenomenon and noted down his observations, but because
his notes happen to be in form and colour, they do not therefore
constitute a work of art. Wherein does his achievement differ in quality
from a coloured map of a country? We can easily conceive of a relief map
of Cadore or Giverny on so large a scale, and so elaborately coloured,
that it will be an exact reproduction of the physical aspects of those
regions, but never for a moment should we place it beside a landscape by
Titian or Monet, and think of it as a work of art. Yet its relation to
the Titian or Monet painting is exactly that of Uccello's achievement to
Giotto's. What the scientist who paints--the naturalist, that is to
say,--attempts to do is not to give us what art alone can give us, the
life-enhancing qualities of objects, but a reproduction of them as they
are. If he succeeded, he would give us the exact visual impression of
the objects themselves, but art, as we have already agreed, must give us
not the mere reproductions of things but a quickened sense of capacity
for realising them. Artistically, then, the naturalists, Uccello and
his numerous successors, accomplished nothing. Yet their efforts to
reproduce objects as they are, their studies in anatomy and perspective,
made it inevitable that when another great genius did arise, he should
be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, and not a Giotto.

[Page heading: ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO]

Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong
tendencies in Florentine painting--of art for dexterity's sake, and art
for scientific purposes. Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to
resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much
artistic genius to succumb to either. He was endowed with great sense
for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him
completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less
from one more peculiar to himself--the tendency