in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist
the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra
Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and
the spring-time? In his Riccardi Palace frescoes, he has sunk already to
portraying the Florentine apprentice's dream of a holiday in the country
on St. John's Day; but what a _naïf_ ideal of luxury and splendour it
is! With these, the glamour in which he saw the world began to fade away
from him, and in his Pisan frescoes we have, it is true, many a quaint
bit of _genre_ (superior to Teniers only because of superior
associations), but never again the fairy tale. And as the better
recedes, it is replaced by the worse, by the bane of all _genre_
painting, non-significant detail, and positive bad taste. Have London
or New York or Berlin worse to show us than the jumble of buildings in
his ideal of a great city, his picture of Babylon? It may be said he
here continues mediæval tradition, which is quite true, but this very
fact indicates his real place, which, in spite of his adopting so many
of the fifteenth-century improvements, is not with the artists of the
Renaissance, but with the story-tellers and costumed fairy-tale painters
of the transition, with Spinello Aretino and Gentile da Fabriano, for
instance. And yet, once in a while, he renders a head with such
character, or a movement with such ease that we wonder whether he had
not in him, after all, the making of a real artist.

[Page heading: GHIRLANDAIO]

Ghirlandaio was born to far more science and cunning in painting than
was current in Benozzo's early years, and all that industry, all that
love of his occupation, all that talent even, can do for a man, they did
for him; but unfortunately he had not a spark of genius. He appreciated
Masaccio's tactile values, Pollaiuolo's movement, Verrocchio's effects