ss and
trappings have so disguised Pegasus that we scarcely know him from a
cart horse. But the painter of the "Venus Rising from the Sea," of the
"Spring," or of the Villa Lemmi frescoes is the greatest artist of
lineal design that Europe has ever had.

XIII.

[Page heading: POPULARISERS OF ART]

Leonardo and Botticelli, like Michelangelo after them, found imitators
but not successors. To communicate more material and spiritual
significance than Leonardo, would have taken an artist with deeper
feeling for significance; to get more music out of design than
Botticelli, would have required a painter with even greater passion for
the re-embodiment of the pure essences of touch and movement. There were
none such in Florence, and the followers of Botticelli--Leonardo's were
all Milanese, and do not here concern us--could but imitate the patterns
of their master: the patterns of the face, the patterns of the
composition, and the patterns of the line; dragging them down to their
own level, sugaring them down to their own palate, slowing them down to
their own insensitiveness for what is life-communicating. And although
their productions, which were nothing but translations of great man's
art into average man's art, became popular, as was inevitable, with the
average man of their time, (who comprehended them better and felt more
comfortable in their presence than in that of the originals which he
respectfully admired but did not so thoroughly enjoy), nevertheless we
need not dwell on these popularisers nor on their popularisations--not
even on Filippino, with his touch of consumptive delicacy, nor
Raffaelino del Garbo, with his glints of never-to-be-fulfilled promise.

[Page heading: FRA BARTOLOMMEO]

Before approaching the one man of genius left in Florence after
Botticelli and Leonardo, before speaking of Michelangelo, the man in
whom all that was most peculiar and much that was greatest in the
striving of Florentine art found its fulfilment, let us turn for a
moment to a few painters who, just because they were men of manifold
talent, might elsewhere almost have become masters. Fra Bartolommeo,
Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Bronzino were perhaps no less gifted as
artists than Palma, Bonifazio Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto; but their
talents, instead of being permitted to flower naturally, were scorched
by the passion for showing off dexterity, blighted by academic ideals,
and uprooted by the whirlwind force of Mi