362 MORE POT-POURRI 



An old friend, to whom I had written of my love of 

 the early Tuscan painters when I was at Florence as a 

 girl of twenty, answered me as follows, and I suppose 

 many would agree with him : 



'The modern taste for the very early Florentine 

 masters must, I think, be an acquired one, and, though 

 in your own case it may have seemed spontaneous, I 

 doubt whether any intellectual taste or tendency is 

 wholly self -formed in the case of a girl of nineteen. 

 At that impressionable age living in a mental atmos- 

 phere congenial to it, you with your quick receptive 

 temperament probably imbibed from those around you, 

 whose opinions on art were entitled to your respect, and 

 without any conscious effort or critical process of your 

 own, that sentiment about the early Florentine masters 

 to which the writings of Ruskin had already given so 

 strong an impulse, and which was then the pervading 

 sentiment of connoisseurs and persons interested in 

 pictorial art. Perugino is the earliest master in whose 

 works I can find beauty a quality essential to my 

 enjoyment of art as such. The earlier masters, Giotto, 

 Cimabue, Taddeo Gaddi, Masaccio, Lippo Lippi, etc., 

 seem to me only interesting.' 



With regard to Botticelli, I feel that he alone perhaps 

 among the Tuscans strikes the note which Berenson 

 alludes to in the following passage from his 'Venetian 

 Painters,' and I like to feel that Berenson's optimism 

 about modern art and life is true : 



'Indeed, not the least attraction of the Venetian 

 masters is their note of modernity, by which I mean the 

 feeling they give us that they were on the high road to 

 the art of to-day. We have seen how, on two separate 

 occasions, Venetian painters gave an impulse to Span- 

 iards, who in turn have had an extraordinary influence 

 on modern painting. It would be easy, too, although it 



