based always on the several peculiar problems and difficulties that
interest them. At Florence these inverted notions about art were
especially prevalent because it was a school of art with a score of men
of genius and a thousand mediocrities all egging each other on to
exhibitions of dexterity, and in their hot rivalry it was all the great
geniuses could do to be faithful to their sense of significance. Even
Masaccio was driven to exhibit his mere skill, the much admired and by
itself wonderfully realised figure of a naked man trembling with cold
being not only without real significance, but positively distracting,
in the representation of a baptism. A weaker man like Paolo Uccello
almost entirely sacrificed what sense of artistic significance he may
have started with, in his eagerness to display his skill and knowledge.
As for the rabble, their work has now the interest of prize exhibitions
at local art schools, and their number merely helped to accelerate the
momentum with which Florentine art rushed to its end. But out of even
mere dexterity a certain benefit to art may come. Men without feeling
for the significant may yet perfect a thousand matters which make
rendering easier and quicker for the man who comes with something to
render, and when Botticelli and Leonardo and Michelangelo appeared, they
found their artistic patrimony increased in spite of the fact that since
Masaccio there had been no man at all approaching their genius. This
increase, however, was due not at all so much to the sons of dexterity,
as to the intellectually much nobler, but artistically even inferior
race of whom also Uccello was the ancestor--the Naturalists.

[Page heading: NATURALISM IN ART]

What is a Naturalist? I venture upon the following definition:--A man
with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not
to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus