Bernhard Berenson

It would be difficult to find more effective illustration of all that has just been said about movement than one or two of Pollaiuolo’s own works, which, in contrast to most of his achievements, where little more than effort and research are visible, are really masterpieces of life-communicating art. Let us look first at his engraving known as the “Battle of the Nudes.” What is it that makes us return to this sheet with ever renewed, ever increased pleasure? Surely it is not the hideous faces of most of the figures and their scarcely less hideous bodies.

Leonardo and Botticelli, like Michelangelo after them, found imitators but not successors. To communicate more material and spiritual significance than Leonardo, would have taken an artist with deeper feeling for significance; to get more music out of design than Botticelli, would have required a painter with even greater passion for the re-embodiment of the pure essences of touch and movement.