different part in each, and that in
landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A
vision of _plein air_, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before
him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of
light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately
chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand
out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this
subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare
and dust of the day--the effect so matchlessly given in Gray's
"Elegy"--seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of
his "Annunciation" (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only
one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil
Leonardo.

X.

[Page heading: GENRE ARTISTS]

It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to
Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again
after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what
their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even
more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any
rank among the world's great artists, and of scarcely any importance as
links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because
of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names
would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine
painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle
and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo
Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled
together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more
than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting
a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the
sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ illustration. And here the
likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed
widely.

[Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI]

Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of
invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a
story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later
in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist
the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra
Angeli