-shade, which exists alone in a world of
brownness. At every step there has been progress, but there has also
been regress. Perhaps the greatest balance of gain against loss and the
nearest approach to a complete art of painting were with the great
Venetians. The transformation is still going on, and in our own day we
have conquered some corners of the science of visible aspects which were
unexplored by our ancestors. But the balance has turned against us; our
loss has been greater than our gain; and our art, even in its scientific
aspect, is inferior to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

And just because there never has been a complete art of painting,
entirely rounded and perfected, it is the clearer to us that the final
value of a work in that art never has depended on its approach to such
completion. There is no one supreme master of painting but a long
succession of masters of different yet equal glory. If the masterpieces
of architecture are everywhere because there has often been a complete
art of architecture, the masterpieces of painting are everywhere for the
opposite reason. And if we do not always value a master the more as his
art is more nearly complete, neither do we always value him especially
who has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. Palma
Vecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master;
Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one of
the immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made a
distinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purely
historic; Fra Angelico made no advance whatever, but he practised
consummately the current art as he found it, and his work is eternally
delightful. At every stage of its development the art of painting has
been a sufficient medium for the expression of a great man's mind; and
wherever and whenever a great man has practised it, the result has been
a great and permanently valuable work of art.

For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts--the one
essential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is a
great man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you have
the man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him;
his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be at
another; but at bottom the art is the man and at all times and in all
countries is just as great as the man.

Let us cl