world to the haunts of Truth and
Nature. Strangest of all, some part of what they say will be right.

The new movement broke up the great Byzantine tradition,[15] and left
the body of art a victim to the onslaught of that strange, new disease,
the Classical Renaissance. The tract that lies between Giotto and
Lionardo is the beginning of the end; but it is not the end. Painting
came to maturity late, and died hard; and the art of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries--especially the Tuscan schools--is not a mere
historical link: it is an important movement, or rather two. The great
Sienese names, Ugolino, Ambrogio Lorenzetti,[16] and Simone Martini,
belong to the old world as much as to the new; but the movement that
produced Masaccio, Masolino, Castagno, Donatello, Piero della Francesca,
and Fra Angelico is a reaction from the Giottesque tradition of the
fourteenth century, and an extremely vital movement. Often, it seems,
the stir and excitement provoked by the ultimately disastrous scientific
discoveries were a cause of good art. It was the disinterested
adoration of perspective, I believe, that enabled Uccello and the Paduan
Mantegna to apprehend form passionately. The artist must have something
to get into a passion about.

Outside Italy, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the
approaches of spiritual bankruptcy are more obvious, though here, too,
painting makes a better fight than architecture. Seven hundred years of
glorious and incessant creation seem to have exhausted the constructive
genius of Europe. Gothic architecture becomes something so nauseous[17]
that one can only rejoice when, in the sixteenth century, the sponge is
thrown up for good, and, abandoning all attempt to create, Europe
settles down quietly to imitate classical models. All true creation was
dead long before that; its epitaph had been composed by the master of
the "Haute Oeuvre" at Beauvais. Only intellectual invention dragged on
a sterile and unlucky existence. A Gothic church of the late Middle Ages
is a thing made to order. A building formula has been devised within
which the artificer, who has ousted the artist, finds endless
opportunity for displaying his address. The skill of the juggler and the
taste of the pastrycook are in great demand now that the power to feel
and the genius to create have been lost. There is brisk trade in pretty
things; buildings are stuck all over with them. Go and peer at each one
separately if you h