of Masaccio.

Uccello had a sense of tactile values and a feeling for colour, but in
so far as he used these gifts at all, it was to illustrate scientific
problems. His real passion was perspective, and painting was to him a
mere occasion for solving some problem in this science, and displaying
his mastery over its difficulties. Accordingly he composed pictures in
which he contrived to get as many lines as possible leading the eye
inward. Prostrate horses, dead or dying cavaliers, broken lances,
ploughed fields, Noah's arks, are used by him with scarcely an attempt
at disguise, to serve his scheme of mathematically converging lines. In
his zeal he forgot local colour--he loved to paint his horses green or
pink--forgot action, forgot composition, and, it need scarcely be added,
significance. Thus in his battle-pieces, instead of adequate action of
any sort, we get the feeling of witnessing a show of stuffed figures
whose mechanical movements have been suddenly arrested by some clog in
their wires; in his fresco of the "Deluge," he has so covered his space
with demonstrations of his cleverness in perspective and foreshortening
that, far from bringing home to us the terrors of a cataclysm, he at the
utmost suggests the bursting of a mill-dam; and in the neighbouring
fresco of the "Sacrifice of Noah," just as some capitally constructed
figures are about to enable us to realise the scene, all possibility of
artistic pleasure is destroyed by our seeing an object in the air which,
after some difficulty, we decipher as a human being plunging downward
from the clouds. Instead of making this figure, which, by the way, is
meant to represent God the Father, plunge toward us, Uccello
deliberately preferred to make it dash inward, away from us, thereby
displaying his great skill in both perspective and foreshortening, but
at the same time writing himself down as the founder of two families of
painters which have flourished ever since, the artists for dexterity's