co who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and
the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to
portraying the Florentine apprentice's dream of a holiday in the country
on St. John's Day; but what a _naif_ ideal of luxury and splendour it
is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away
from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint
bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior
associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better
recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_
painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London
or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in
his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he
here continues mediaeval tradition, which is quite true, but this very
fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many
of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the
Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters
of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for
instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such
character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had
not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.

[Page heading: GHIRLANDAIO]

Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than
was current in Benozzo's early years, and all that industry, all that
love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did
for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated
Masaccio's tactile values, Pollaiuolo's movement, Verrocchio's effects
of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these
great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: "There
now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me
something that I can really enjoy!" Bright colour, pretty faces, good
likenesses, and the obvious everywhere--attractive and delightful, it
must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never
significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa
Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of
the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still
suggest so many _tableaux vivants_ pushed into the wall side by side,
and in tier