Bernhard Berenson

What is a Naturalist? I venture upon the following definition:—A man with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus communicating them to us more rapidly and intensely than we should perceive them ourselves, and thereby giving us a sense of heightened vitality; his purpose is research, and his communication consists of nothing but facts.

The great Florentine artists, as we have seen, were, with scarcely an exception, bent upon rendering the material significance of visible things. This, little though they may have formulated it, was the conscious aim of most of them; and in proportion as they emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical dominion, and found among their employers men capable of understanding them, their aim became more and more conscious and their striving more energetic.

• Assisi.
  
  • S. Francesco, Upper Church. XX-XXV and first of Frescoes recounting the Life of St. Francis, done perhaps under Giotto’s directions. XXVI-XXVIII of same series done more upon his own responsibility.
    
    • Lower Church, Chapel of the Sacrament. Frescoes: Legend of St. Nicholas; Christ with SS. Francis and Nicholas and Donors, etc. (?). Before 1316. Madonna between SS. Francis and Nicholas (?).
      

Psychology has ascertained that sight alone gives us no accurate sense of the third dimension. In our infancy, long before we are conscious of the process, the sense of touch, helped on by muscular sensations of movement, teaches us to appreciate depth, the third dimension, both in objects and in space.

In the same unconscious years we learn to make of touch, of the third dimension, the test of reality. The child is still dimly aware of the intimate connection between touch and the third dimension.

Uccello, as I have said, was the first representative of two strong tendencies in Florentine painting—of art for dexterity’s sake, and art for scientific purposes. Andrea del Castagno, while also unable to resist the fascination of mere science and dexterity, had too much artistic genius to succumb to either. He was endowed with great sense for the significant, although, it is true, not enough to save him completely from the pitfalls which beset all Florentines, and even less from one more peculiar to himself—the tendency to communicate at any cost a feeling of power.