to communicate at any
cost a feeling of power. To make us feel power as Masaccio and
Michelangelo do at their best is indeed an achievement, but it requires
the highest genius and the profoundest sense for the significant. The
moment this sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in
conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere
strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying
high spirits. Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such
single figures as his Cumaean Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which
have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty,
elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,--as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo
di Tolentino--or to mere strength, as in his "Last Supper," or, worse
still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa Maria Nuova "Crucifixion."
Nevertheless, his few remaining works lead us to suspect in him the
greatest artist, and the most influential personality among the painters
of the first generation after Masaccio.

VI.

[Page heading: DOMENICO VENEZIANO]

To distinguish clearly, after the lapse of nearly five centuries,
between Uccello and Castagno, and to determine the precise share each
had in the formation of the Florentine school, is already a task fraught
with difficulties. The scantiness of his remaining works makes it more
than difficult, makes it almost impossible, to come to accurate
conclusions regarding the character and influence of their somewhat
younger contemporary, Domenico Veneziano. That he was an innovator in
technique, in affairs of vehicle and medium, we know from Vasari; but as
such innovations, indispensable though they may become to painting as a
craft, are in themselves questions of theoretic and applied chemistry,
and not of art, they do not here concern us. His artistic achievements
seem to have consisted in giving to the figure movement and expression,
and to the face individuality. In his existing works we find no trace of
sacrifice made to dexterity and naturalism, although it is clear that he
must have been master of whatever science and whatever craft were
prevalent in his day. Otherwise he would not have been able to render a
figure like the St. Francis in his Uffizi altar-piece, where tactile
values and movement expressive of character--what we usually call
individual _gait_--were perhaps for the first time combined; or to
attain to such triumphs as his St. John and St. Francis