view of Lake Trasimene from Cortona), but the first to communicate a
sense of the pleasantness of nature. How readily we feel the freshness
and spring-time gaiety of his gardens in the frescoes of the
"Annunciation" and the "Noli me tangere" at San Marco!


IV.

[Page heading: MASACCIO]

Giotto born again, starting where death had cut short his advance,
instantly making his own all that had been gained during his absence,
and profiting by the new conditions, the new demands--imagine such an
avatar, and you will understand Masaccio.

Giotto we know already, but what were the new conditions, the new
demands? The mediæval skies had been torn asunder and a new heaven and a
new earth had appeared, which the abler spirits were already inhabiting
and enjoying. Here new interests and new values prevailed. The thing of
sovereign price was the power to subdue and to create; of sovereign
interest all that helped man to know the world he was living in and his
power over it. To the artist the change offered a field of the freest
activity. It is always his business to reveal to an age its ideals. But
what room was there for sculpture and painting,--arts whose first
purpose it is to make us realise the material significance of things--in
a period like the Middle Ages, when the human body was denied all
intrinsic significance? In such an age the figure artist can thrive, as
Giotto did, only in spite of it, and as an isolated phenomenon. In the
Renaissance, on the contrary, the figure artist had a demand made on him
such as had not been made since the great Greek days, to reveal to a