movement had been obtained.
Indeed, wherever, in the art of the fifteenth century, we find a beginning
of innovation in the conception and arrangement of a Scripture history,
we shall find also the beginning of the new technical method which has
suggested such a partial innovation. Thus, in the case of one of the
greatest, but least appreciated, masters of the early Renaissance, Paolo
Uccello. His Deluge, in the frescoes of the green cloister of S. Maria
Novella, is wonderfully original as a whole conception; and the figure
clinging to the side of the ark, with soaked and wind-blown drapery;
the man in a tub trying to sustain himself with his hands, the effort
and strain of the people in the water, are admirable as absolute
realisation of the scene. Again, in the Sacrifice of Noah, there is in
the foreshortened figure of God, floating, brooding, like a cloud, with
face downward and outstretched hands over the altar, something which is
a prophecy, and more than a prophecy, of what art will come to in the
Sixtine and the Loggie. But these inventions are due to Uccello's
special and extraordinary studies of the problems of modelling and
foreshortening; and when his contemporaries try to assimilate his
achievements, and unite them with the achievements of other men in other
special technical directions, there is an end of all individual poetical
conception, and a relapse into the traditional arrangements; as may be
seen by comparing the Bible stories of Paolo Uccello with those of
Benozzo Gozzoli at Pisa.

It is not wonderful that the painters of the fifteenth century should
have been satisfied with repeating the themes left by the Giottesques.
For the Giottesques had left them, besides this positive heritage, a
negative heritage, a programme to fill up, of which it is difficult to
realise the magnitude. The work of the Giottesques is so merely poetic,
or at most so merely decorative in the sense of a mosaic or a tapestry,
and it is in the case of Giotto and one or two of his greatest
contemporaries, particularly the Sienese, so well-balanced and
satisfying as a result of its elementary nature that we are apt to
overlook the fact that everything in the way of realisation as opposed
to indication, everything distinguishing the painting of a story from
the mere telling thereof, remained to be done. And such realisation
could be attained only through a series of laborious failures. It is by
comparing some of the later Giottesq