While this Tuscan grace was permeating Italy, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Fra Angelico, or it Beato, the blessed, was painting diaphanous saints and angels: vera mente 'di Paradiso. His art was a sweet psal mody. The ladder seen by Jacob in his dream, upon which fair angels ascended to Heaven, was seen anew by Giovanni, whom posterity calls the Blessed. He composed sacred scenes with great ingenuity and with a childlike sim plicity. His Madonnas are clothed in Gothic tunics; their eyes look out beneath faintly penciled brows; their form is the lithe, slender body of immaturity. Fra Angelico prayed be fore beginning a picture and wept when he painted the Crucifixion. His devils are mild, — never devilish.
Benozzo Gozzbli and Fra Lippo Lippi painted more substantially and developed further the forms of it Beato; but they lacked his ingenuousness. The former was the miff and smiling story-telling artist of the Renais sance; the latter a vigorous, rugged painter, not wholly of the cloister.
Andrea del Castagno and Paolo Uccello, stronger than Gozzoli and Lippi, were not so mystic or contemplative. Andrea had brutal vigor and Uccello tried the nude and was the first to paint battle scenes and to study perspec tive. Persellino, • the youthful and gentle, sought for corporeal beauty, and his pictures are full of lively grace. Castagna, Uccello and the perspective laws of della Francesca in spired Baldovinetti, the two Pollajuoli and Andrea del Verrocchio, whose delineations of the human form were robust, correct and of almost a plastic quality. Baldovinetti gained fame from his mastery of minute details. Pietro and Antonio Pollajuolo were the first to reject tempera in favor of oils: they were goldsmiths, niello workers, engravers, perhaps etchers; and they were the first to dissect the human body for art's sake. Verrocchio, a great sculptor, was the first Florentine to un derstand landscape. His Colleone statue in Venice °stands for the most magnificent equestrian statue of all times.° Sandro Botticelli painted for the secular world; he was original, nervous and vehement. Myths and fables were his themes oftener than Bible stories. A face long, narrow and with full, steadily gazing eyes, has become the UBotticelli face); and with the Pre-Raphaelites of England it was revived, especially by the brush of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In Botticelli the art of Florence became a canticle of spring, redolent of jessamine and roses. Two of his followers, Filippino Lippi and Ghirlandajo, closed the era of *Quattrocento Florentine painting.* The former had amazing facility, invention, grace and clarity; the latter loved to paint musical instruments as accessories in many of his pictures, and was a great master in mosaic.
Lucca Signorelli, the Cortonese, was strong, quick and resolute; his pictures are warm, ruddy, sunburnt. lie was always a moun taineer, but beneath his rough exterior was a glowing soul. His nudes seem to be hewn with an axe; but the results are robust, healthy bodies. He has been called the *Dante of but he is par excellence the painter of the nude.
The Tuscan school of the Quattrocento had as the crowning glory of its sincere efforts, of its indefatigable research, the work of the giant Michelangelo, and of Leonardo the prophet of modern times. Michelangelo re mained a sculptor in his painting; his prophets, his sibyls, have the imperial cast of the Moses who is about to arise and terrify with his thundrous tones. He disdained the grace which other painters of the Quattrocento cher ished; the latter had been prodigal of flowers and smiles when portraying sacred figures; he infused a sculptural, monumental grandeur into them. They had refined and prettified everything, whilst he enlarged everything and raised it to sublime proportions. His athletes wrestled under the vigor of 'his gaze, or reposed solemnly in their corners. The' physic:riot:moil traits of his figures disappear, to give .place to the lineaments of thee imagination; we can not see into the foundation of the works of Michelangelo, for the man himself, alone fills the entire space and breaks down the ob stacles and the limitations from within; lifti dwells in him and bursts forth from him, .
Leonardo da Vinci, inspired by his vision of things, impelled always by an irresistible de sire to do something new, restless because of the sense of perfection, which ever wider horizons had hitherto denied to his attainment. left uncompleted the greater part of his work because he found matter inadequate to depict the soul of things. Sublime in every stroke and in every word, Leonardo, even in, his own day, appeared a prodigy. He held the eye of the painters of Lombardy, who revolved about him as satellites about a central sun. The pure ideals and idealism that came from past ages and the accumulated energy of genera tions, all found expression in this marvelous man, who defies study and analysis. He painted two of the world's masterpieces,