, at Santa Croce,
whose entire figures express as much fervour as their eloquent faces.
As to his sense for the significant in the individual, in other words,
his power as a portrait-painter, we have in the Pitti one or two heads
to witness, perhaps, the first great achievements in this kind of the
Renaissance.

[Page heading: FRA FILIPPO LIPPI]

No such difficulties as we have encountered in the study of Uccello,
Castagno, and Veneziano meet us as we turn to Fra Filippo. His works are
still copious, and many of them are admirably preserved; we therefore
have every facility for judging him as an artist, yet nothing is harder
than to appreciate him at his due. If attractiveness, and attractiveness
of the best kind, sufficed to make a great artist, then Filippo would be
one of the greatest, greater perhaps than any other Florentine before
Leonardo. Where shall we find faces more winsome, more appealing, than
in certain of his Madonnas--the one in the Uffizi, for instance--more
momentarily evocative of noble feeling than in his Louvre altar-piece?
Where in Florentine painting is there anything more fascinating than the
playfulness of his children, more poetic than one or two of his
landscapes, more charming than is at times his colour? And with all
this, health, even robustness, and almost unfailing good-humour! Yet by
themselves all these qualities constitute only a high-class illustrator,
and such by native endowment I believe Fra Filippo to have been. That he
became more--very much more--is due rather to Masaccio's potent
influence than to his own genius; for he had no profound sense of either
material or spiritual significance--the essential qualifications of the
real artist. Working under the inspiration of Masaccio, he at times
renders tactile values admirably, as in the Uffizi Madonna--but most
frequently he betrays no genuine feeling for them, failing in his
attempt to render them by the introduction of bunchy, billowy,
calligraphic draperies. These, acquired from the late Giottesque painter
(probably Lorenzo Monaco) who had been his first master, he seems to
have prized as artistic elements no less than the tactile values which
he attempted to adopt later, serenely unconscious, apparently, of their
incompatibility. Filippo's strongest impulse was not toward the
pre-eminently artistic one of re-creation, but rather toward expression,
and within that field, toward the expression of the pleasant, genial,
spirituall