during this period were starting, was mainly toward naturalism. Later,
in studying Botticelli, we shall see how difficult it was for any one
young at the time to escape this tide, even if by temperament farthest
removed from scientific interests.

Meanwhile we must continue our study of the naturalists, but now of the
second generation. Their number and importance from 1460 to 1490 is not
alone due to the fact that art education toward the beginning of this
epoch was mainly naturalistic, but also to the real needs of a rapidly
advancing craft, and even more to the character of the Florentine mind,
the dominant turn of which was to science and not to art. But as there
were then no professions scientific in the stricter sense of the word,
and as art of some form was the pursuit of a considerable proportion of
the male inhabitants of Florence, it happened inevitably that many a lad
with the natural capacities of a Galileo was in early boyhood
apprenticed as an artist. And as he never acquired ordinary methods of
scientific expression, and never had time for occupations not
bread-winning, he was obliged his life long to make of his art both the
subject of his strong instinctive interest in science, and the vehicle
of conveying his knowledge to others.

[Page heading: ALESSIO BALDOVINETTI]

This was literally the case with the oldest among the leaders of the new
generation, Alessio Baldovinetti, in whose scanty remaining works no
trace of purely artistic feeling or interest can be discerned; and it is
only less true of Alessio's somewhat younger, but far more gifted
contemporaries, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchio. These also we
should scarcely suspect of being more than men of science, if Pollaiuolo
once or twice, and Verrocchio more frequently, did not dazzle us with