X.

[Page heading: GENRE ARTISTS]

It is a temptation to hasten on from Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio to
Botticelli and Leonardo, to men of genius as artists reappearing again
after two generations, men who accomplished with scarcely an effort what
their precursors had been toiling after. But from these it would be even
more difficult than at present to turn back to painters of scarcely any
rank among the world's great artists, and of scarcely any importance as
links in a chain of evolution, but not to be passed by, partly because
of certain qualities they do possess, and partly because their names
would be missed in an account, even so brief as this, of Florentine
painting. The men I chiefly refer to, one most active toward the middle
and the other toward the end of the fifteenth century, are Benozzo
Gozzoli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Although they have been rarely coupled
together, they have much in common. Both were, as artists, little more
than mediocrities with almost no genuine feeling for what makes painting
a great art. The real attractiveness of both lies entirely outside the
sphere of pure art, in the realms of _genre_ illustration. And here the
likeness between them ends; within their common ground they differed
widely.

[Page heading: BENOZZO GOZZOLI]

Benozzo was gifted with a rare facility not only of execution but of
invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a
story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later