Painting

• Assisi.
  
  • S. Francesco. Altar-frontal embroidered probably from designs by Piero.
• Florence.
  
  • Bargello. Bust of Young Warrior (Terra-cotta). Hercules and Antæus (Bronze).
  • Opera del Duomo. Enamels in Pedestal of Silver Crucifix. Finished 1459. Birth of Baptist (Relief in Silver).
    

This was literally the case with the oldest among the leaders of the new generation, Alessio Baldovinetti, in whose scanty remaining works no trace of purely artistic feeling or interest can be discerned; and it is only less true of Alessio’s somewhat younger, but far more gifted contemporaries, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchio.

For a hundred years after Giotto there appeared in Florence no painter equally endowed with dominion over the significant. His immediate followers so little understood the essence of his power that some thought it resided in his massive types, others in the swiftness of his line, and still others in his light colour, and it never occurred to any of them that the massive form without its material significance, its tactile values, is a shapeless sack, that the line which is not functional is mere calligraphy, and that light colour by itself can at the best spot a surface prettily.