of light, and succeeded in so sugaring down what he adopted from these
great masters that the superior philistine of Florence could say: "There
now is a man who knows as much as any of the great men, but can give me
something that I can really enjoy!" Bright colour, pretty faces, good
likenesses, and the obvious everywhere--attractive and delightful, it
must be granted, but, except in certain single figures, never
significant. Let us glance a moment at his famous frescoes in Santa
Maria Novella. To begin with, they are so undecorative that, in spite of
the tone and surface imparted to them by four centuries, they still
suggest so many _tableaux vivants_ pushed into the wall side by side,
and in tiers. Then the compositions are as overfilled as the sheets of
an illustrated newspaper--witness the "Massacre of the Innocents," a
scene of such magnificent artistic possibilities. Finally, irrelevant
episodes and irrelevant groups of portraits do what they can to distract
our attention from all higher significance. Look at the "Birth of John";
Ginevra dei Benci stands there, in the very foreground, staring out at
you as stiff as if she had a photographer's iron behind her head. An
even larger group of Florentine housewives in all their finery
disfigures the "Birth of the Virgin," which is further spoiled by a _bas
relief_ to show off the painter's acquaintance with the antique, and by
the figure of the serving maid who pours out water, with the rush of a
whirlwind in her skirts--this to show off skill in the rendering of
movement. Yet elsewhere, as in his "Epiphany" in the Uffizi, Ghirlandaio
has undeniable charm, and occasionally in portraits his talent, here at
its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of
Sassetti in Santa Trinità, becoming almost genius.


XI.