cond picture in this room, from Giotto's brush, we see life really
awakening. The Madonna is vivifying; the Child is nearer childhood; we
can believe that here are veins with blood in them. Moreover, whereas
Cimabue's angels brought masonry, these bring flowers. It is crude,
no doubt, but it is enough; the new art, which was to counterfeit
and even extend nature, has really begun; the mystery and glory of
painting are assured and the door opened for Botticelli.

But much had to happen first, particularly the mastery of the laws of
perspective, and it was not (as we have seen) until Ghiberti had got
to work on his first doors, and Brunelleschi was studying architecture
and Uccello sitting up all night at his desk, that painting as we
know it--painting of men and women "in the round"--could be done,
and it was left for a youth who was not born until Giotto had been
dead sixty-four years to do this first as a master--one Tommaso
di Ser Giovanni Guido da Castel San Giovanni, known as Masaccio,
or Big Tom. The three great names then in the evolution of Italian
painting, a subject to which I return in chapter XXV, on the Carmine,
are Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio.

We pass on at the Accademia from Cimabue's pupil Giotto, to Giotto's
followers, Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi, and Daddi's follower
Spinello Aretino, and the long dependent and interdependent line of
painters. For the most part they painted altar-pieces, these early
craftsmen, the Church being the principal patron of art. These
works are many of them faded and so elementary as to have but an
antiquarian interest; but think of the excitement in those days when
the picture was at last ready, and, gay in its gold, was erected in the
chapel! Among the purely ecclesiastical works No. 137, an Annunciation
by Giovanni del Biondo (second half of the fourteenth century),
is light and cheerful, and No. 142, the Crowning of the Virgin, by
Rosello di Jacopo Franchi (1376-1456), has some delightful details and
is everywhere joyous, with a charming green pattern in it. The wedding
scenes in No. 147 give us Florentine life on the mundane side with
some valuable thoroughness, and the Pietro Lorenzetti above--scenes
in the life of S. Umilita--is very quaint and cheery and was painted
as early as 1316. The little Virgin adoring, No. 160, in the corner,
by the fertile Ignoto, is charmingly pretty.

And now for the three screens, notable among the screens of the
galleries of Europe a