his numerous successors, accomplished nothing. Yet their efforts to
reproduce objects as they are, their studies in anatomy and perspective,
made it inevitable that when another great genius did arise, he should
be a Leonardo or a Michelangelo, and not a Giotto.

[Page heading: ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO]

Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong
tendencies in Florentine painting--of art for dexterity's sake, and art
for scientific purposes. Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to
resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much
artistic genius to succumb to either. He was endowed with great sense
for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him
completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less
from one more peculiar to himself--the tendency to communicate at any
cost a feeling of power. To make us feel power as Masaccio and
Michelangelo do at their best is indeed an achievement, but it requires
the highest genius and the profoundest sense for the significant. The
moment this sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in
conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere
strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying
high spirits. Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such
single figures as his Cumæan Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which
have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty,
elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,--as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo
di Tolentino--or to mere strength, as in his "Last Supper," or, worse
still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa Maria Nuova "Crucifixion."
Nevertheless, his few remaining works lead us to suspect in him the
greatest artist, and the most influential personality among the painters
of the first generation after Masaccio.