figures before. The buildings, too, he made to look
like real houses leading away into the distance, and
not just like a flat picture.

He painted many frescoes both in Florence and
Rome, this Ugly Tom, but at the time the people
did not pay him much honour, for they thought him
just a great awkward fellow with his head always
in the clouds. Perhaps if he had lived longer fame
and wealth would have come to him, but he died
when he was still a young man, and only a few
realised how great he was.

But in after years, one by one, all the great
artists would come to that little chapel of the
Carmine there to learn their first lessons from those
life-like figures. Especially they would stand before
the fresco which shows St. Peter baptizing a crowd
of people. And in that fresco they would study
more than all the figure of a boy who has just come
out of the water, shivering with cold, the most
natural figure that had ever been painted up to that
time.

All things must be learnt little by little, and
each new thing we know is a step onwards. So
this figure of the shivering boy marks a higher step
of the golden ladder of Art than any that had
been touched before. And this alone would have
made the name of Masaccio worthy to be placed